Medicine: Intellectual Provocateur

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For 50 of his 83 years Sigmund Freud has insisted on talking seriously about subjects that other people did not want to discuss. When he began lecturing on the sexual basis of neuroses, in Vienna in 1896, his worldly colleagues regarded him with the embarrassed annoyance reserved for those who hammer away at something people would rather not talk about, even if talking would teach them something. But for laymen, as Freud's theories spread, he emerged as the greatest killjoy in the history of human thought, transforming man's jokes and gentle pleasures into dreary and mysterious repressions, discovering hatreds at the root of love, malice at the heart of tenderness, incest in filial affections, guilt in generosity and the repressed hatred of one's father as a normal human inheritance.

Last week, from his home in exile in London, this 83-year-old disturber of human complacency calmly turned his attention to another topic generally and understandably avoided. This time he psychoanalyzed antiSemitism. What, he asked, are the reasons for a phenomenon of such intensity and lasting strength as popular hatred of the Jews? Economic and political reasons Freud leaves to others; in Moses and Monotheism* he is concerned with hidden motives.

Most of the book is given over to an account of the infancy of the Jewish people—not as it is known historically, but as it emerges in their legends, beliefs and religious customs. Its purpose is not to relate a factually, but a psychologically accurate picture, thereby uncovering, Freud believes, the reasons for popular hatred of the Jews and the reasons for the Jewish attitudes toward the persecutions that have darkened their history.

Background. Only in view of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis is Moses and Monotheism intelligible. And the history of psychoanalysis is the history of Sigmund Freud.

When young Dr. Freud, fresh from five years' research on the nervous system, returned to his native Vienna and with high hopes hung out his shingle, the gay city was thronged with neurotics, "who hurried, with their troubles unsolved, from one physician to another." Some were afraid of animals; others constantly washed their hands, stammered, endured blinding headaches, lingering illnesses, or even developed strange paralyses of the arms and legs. All balanced precariously on the slender line between sanity and insanity. That the cause of their maladies was psychological, the 30-year-old psychiatrist was certain. But how these maladies arose, and how they could be cured—that was his great problem.

In his Paris clinic, Hypnotist Charcot had often commanded drowsy neurotics to shed their symptoms. But only a few obeyed the doctor's powerful will and woke up cured. Yet hypnotism was the only scientific light which could prick the deep caverns of the unconscious mind, and even if it brought no lasting cures, young Dr. Freud could not very well do without it.

His first great step toward the development of psychoanalysis came one day when his old friend, Dr. Josef Breuer, a brilliant, popular family doctor, told him the remarkable story of "Anna O."