Medicine: The Man Who Knew Freud

The Man Who Knew Freud Few psychiatrists ever took Sigmund Freud as calmly as did James Tucker Fisher. Perhaps it was his background. Fisher spent the best years of his boyhood in the saddle herding cattle on an Illinois farm, did not learn to read & write until he was 13, dropped out of M.I.T., made a fortune in San Diego real estate, became a veterinarian, and decided not to practice the profession when a proper Bostonian lady refused to marry a "horse doctor." So Fisher went to Harvard, got his M.D. and became a mind doctor.

That was just before the turn of the century and before Freud had become a legend. As Psychiatrist Fisher, 88, tells it now in A Few Buttons Missing (Lippincott; $3.50), he found Freud "but one of the many distinguished men under whom I studied. And, frankly, one of the less impressive." He adds: "I learned a great deal more about Sigmund Freud by reading about him than I ever learned by listening to him. And I had to wait until he was heralded by the world at large before I . . . could derive any satisfaction from explaining that I used to know him when."

Unlearn & Relearn. In his wise and witty book (written in collaboration with Lowell S. Hawley, onetime newspaperman), Dr. Fisher describes his postgraduate days in Vienna as "a turbulent, hectic period—where the task each morning was to forget three-fourths of what had been learned the day before and had subsequently been disproved; and where the task each night was to remember half of what had been purposely forgotten in the morning because the theories which disproved these things had been themselves disproved."

But, Dr. Fisher adds: "Despite any. . . reservations that have prevented me from becoming a rah-rah boy of the Freudian school, I am quite sure that the contributions of Sigmund Freud toward the advancement of psychotherapy far outweigh the contributions of any other ten men I have met."