Books: A Special Kind of Being

A Special Kind of Being

LETTERS OF SIGMUND FREUD (470 pp.)— Selected and edited by Ernst L. Freud —Basic Books ($7.50).

Lives of great men are far less sublime than Longfellow thought, and their letters often prove it. If Sigmund Freud had not put his genius into psychoanalysis, even his son Ernst would have seen small reason to assemble this bundle of his father's correspondence, some of it already mined by Ernest Jones in his famed biography of the Master. Freud's letters are not brilliant, witty, or especially intimate. But their truculent honesty...