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“If Freud had died in 1906, there would have been no structural theory of the mind, no elaborated metapsychology …, no speculation about what, if anything, was beyond the pleasure principle, no sweeping critique of religion, and no death drive” (p. 145), and also, one could add, no so-called Oedipus complex ; no anal , oral , and phallic phase ; no theory of paranoia and depression ; no concept of narcissism , and so on.
There would just have been a theory of dreams, of jokes, of mistakes, and an intriguing clue about the practice of psychoanalysis, which would have been more than enough. And there would have been no real psychoanalytic movement…. His work would have become what his followers made of it…. Indeed the subsequent history of psychoanalysis can be divided, in a sense, into those who, as it were, wished that Freud died in 1906, and those who did not. (pp. 145-146)
Phillips does not state it explicitly, but his sympathies seem to be rather with the former: “Freud's writing between 1898 and 1905 … created a panic that psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud, could only recover from, ironically, through repressing the discoveries of psychoanalysis itself” (p. 147).
It is the story of this “young” Freud (dustcover), that is, the Freud until the age of fifty, that Phillips wants to tell here. “The story of Freud's life is easily told” (p. 1), the book's provocative “hooker”—not a prostitute but a good first line—reads, only to show, in the following pages, that the writing of life stories has become, precisely through Freud's contributions, an impossible profession. Loosely following the chronology of Freud's life—the childhood marked by migration and losses; his studies at the Gymnasium and the university; the trip to Paris; his marriage (he “became a psychoanalyst because he had to get married”; p. 70) and the birth of six children within eight years; the invention of a new theory, a new profession, and of a new “couple, the psychoanalyst and her patient” (p. 45)