1. Frank Sulloway: Freud as Closet Sociobiologist

In its opening sentence, Frank Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind announces itself as “a comprehensive intellectual biography of Sigmund Freud.”^[1] Sulloway would doubtless protest my calling his book anti-Freudian, because his explicit purpose is not to denigrate Freud but to interpret him aright. The dominant biographical tradition, he insists, has misrepresented Freud. By breaking with that tradition, Sulloway aims to usher in a new understanding of the master: “In this intellectual biography I have aspired to mark a watershed in the history of Freud studies” (xiii). But despite its manifest enthusiasm for Freud’s achievement, the book’s latent hostility is easily discernible. Appropriately, more resolute anti-Freudians, like Frederick Crews, have been quick to seize on its critical implications. It will be the burden of my argument in this chapter to show that Sulloway’s new interpretation, whatever its empirical merits (and I will try to assess them), ultimately serves to diminish Freud. His book is thus legitimately reckoned among the most important anti-Freudian writings of the recent past. Not only is it one of the earliest documents in a rising tide of hostility to Freud, but it remains in some respects the most impressive.

The school of interpretation Sulloway sets out to discredit he calls “the Freud legend,” a legend he sees embodied most perfectly in the three-volume authorized biography by Ernest Jones. But Jones merely heads a long list of psychoanalytic mythologizers of Freud’s life. Jones has been aided by Freud himself (whose autobiographical remarks and writings constitute the original version of the legend), as well as by “the Freud family, psychoanalysts-turned-historians, and former patients” (xiii). At the heart of the legend stands the proposition that Freud’s science—psychoanalysis—is a “pure psychology”: its fundamental concepts are strictly mental, in both derivation and content. Those concepts were developed by Freud only when he gave up his earlier identity as a neurologist and stopped trying to understand mental life in terms of biology and chemistry. Thus the legend recounts Freud’s intellectual development in the crucial years of discovery—the 1890s—as a journey from a materialist to a mentalist conception of human psychology. Similarly, credit for that intellectual transformation has been awarded principally to Freud’s self-analysis: the painful examination of his interior life, through which Freud discovered the elements of his new psychology, above all infantile sexuality and the unconscious. Psychoanalysis, according to the legend, is not only a pure psychology but one discovered by purely psychological means.

Against the Freud legend Sulloway pits his own conviction that Freud was in fact a “crypto-biologist.” In inventing psychoanalysis, Freud did not abandon biological reductionism in favor of an autonomous conception of mind. Rather, psychoanalytic theory was rooted in a set of biological assumptions and modes of reasoning. “It is my contention,” Sulloway writes, “that many, if not most, of Freud’s fundamental conceptions were biological by inspiration as well as by implication” (5). Subjected to close scrutiny, Freud’s ideas reveal “an otherwise hidden rationality” (5) that is essentially evolutionary. This assertion of an underlying evolutionary logic lies at the heart of Sulloway’s reinterpretation of Freud’s thought, and the persuasiveness of Sulloway’s account ultimately stands or falls with his ability to convince us of the determining presence of that logic. If Sulloway is right, Freud’s position in the intellectual landscape fundamentally alters. Rather than being the inventor of a new psychology, he finds his place in the tradition of biological theorizing that reaches from Charles Darwin to Edward O. Wilson. Sulloway himself draws just such a historical trajectory: “Freud stands squarely within an intellectual lineage where he is, at once, a principal scientific heir of Charles Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers in the nineteenth century and a major forerunner of the ethologists and sociobiologists of the twentieth century” (5). Hence Sulloway’s title: “Biologist of the Mind.”

Sulloway’s placing of Freud between Darwin and Wilson suggests a more general tactic of his reinterpretation. He is eager to disabuse us of the notion that Freud conceived his ideas in intellectual isolation. The legend, Sulloway contends, has greatly overstated Freud’s independence and originality. Not only did Freud enjoy the sustaining inspiration of Darwin, but he also made his critical discoveries within a rich context of contemporary intellectual influences. Wilhelm Fliess, to whose relationship with Freud Sulloway devotes his two central chapters, was only the most prominent among those influences. Whether by way of personal and professional association (as with Fliess, Jean Martin Charcot, and Josef Breuer) or by way of books and correspondence (as with the sexologists Havelock Ellis and Albert Moll), Freud developed his ideas not through courageous and lonely self-examination but through the familiar vehicle of intellectual dialogue. Sulloway argues, in particular, that the figures who influenced Freud most profoundly shared the evolutionary assumptions and modes of reasoning that constitute the “hidden rationality” of psychoanalysis. Thus Freud becomes merely the most prominent of a generation of intellectuals working within the same scientific paradigm—the representative spokesman of an age devoted to understanding human thought and behavior in evolutionary terms. “His theories—right or wrong—stand as an epitome of the late-nineteenth-century vision of man put forth by so many of his forgotten contemporaries” (497).

Sulloway calls Freud a “crypto-biologist” rather than a biologist tout court because his biographers have systematically disguised the evolutionary assumptions and reasoning that lay at the heart of his insights. For this reason, the inner rationality of Freud’s thought has remained hidden, waiting for Sulloway to reveal it. Not surprisingly, Sulloway devotes a good deal of energy to explaining just why the Freudian establishment has gone to such lengths to hide Freud’s biological legacy. After all, it is hardly scandalous to accuse Freud of being a Darwinian—or even a Lamarckian—especially when the “accusation” assumes the form, as it does here, of celebrating the rigor and imagination with which Freud applied evolutionary concepts to an understanding of mind. It becomes a scandal, in Sulloway’s view, only because it diminishes Freud’s claim to originality. Sulloway holds that such a claim was essential to Freud’s self-image, as well as enormously useful to the psychoanalytic movement. By representing Freud as an original, a loner—the rebellious defender of the purely mental in an age of materialism and biological reductionism—the analytic establishment cultivated a revolutionary combativeness that kept its enemies at bay. The historical reconstruction of Freud as pure psychologist and the repression of his debt to evolutionary biology are thus, in Sulloway’s analysis, essentially political acts. The plausibility of his case, he recognizes, depends heavily on whether he can persuade us of the central role this ideological motive has played in fashioning the story of Freud’s life. Otherwise, the elaborate biological cover-up makes no sense. Appropriately, Sulloway spends the final two chapters of his intellectual biography attempting to prove the decisiveness of this ideological agenda. As he writes in his preface: “I have dedicated the third and concluding part of this book to elucidating the brilliant political strategy embodied in the Freud legend” (xiii).

For a book that presents itself as a comprehensive intellectual biography, Freud, Biologist of the Mind is very strangely proportioned. As just noted, a substantial part of it deals not with Freud at all but with the fabrication of his legend. More striking yet, less than one hundred of its five hundred pages of text are devoted to the four decades of Freud’s public career, stretching from The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 to Moses and Monotheism in 1939. By way of comparison, both the second and third volumes of Ernest Jones’s biography deal entirely with the post-1900 years, as do all but the first one hundred pages of Peter Gay’s 650-page Freud: A Life for Our Time. The great bulk of Sulloway’s biography, in sharp contrast, treats the years before the public emergence of psychoanalysis. This shift of attention to the young Freud, the preanalytic Freud, is characteristic of other recent critics as well, in particular Jeffrey Masson, Marianne Krüll, and Marie Balmary, whose studies focus on a few years, even a few months, in the 1890s. An analogous development took place in studies of Marx during the 1920s and 1930s, when attention to his earlier concerns virtually revolutionized our conception of Marx as a thinker, replacing the economic determinist and materialist of the older biographical tradition with a young Hegelian humanist. One might even argue that the Fliess correspondence, which provides a unique window on Freud’s intellectual evolution in the 1890s, has served in this process of biographical reconstruction a function similar to that of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844—although in Marx’s case the reinterpreters (such as Georg Lukács and Erich Fromm) were a good deal more sympathetic to Marx than Masson, Krüll, Balmary, and even Sulloway are to Freud. Just as Marx’s new biographers found a strain of youthful philosophical idealism beneath the austerely economic argument of Das Kapital, so Sulloway pretends to detect a youthful biologist alive and well beneath the “purely psychological” argument of Die Traumdeutung.

Nor does Sulloway’s extended treatment of the preanalytic Freud present a chronological narrative of Freud’s interests and achievements during the quarter century from his first biological papers of the 1870s through the neurological essays of the 1890s. Indeed, these chapters are organized not around Freud at all, but rather around a series of figures whose relationships with Freud, Sulloway contends, were crucial to his intellectual development. This maneuver is essential to the aim of discrediting the image of Freud as an isolated revolutionary: by consistently linking Freud with significant others, Sulloway creates an impression that might be called “diminishment by association.” Freud is always seen as one figure in a dyad, or sometimes—as in the chapter on the turn-of-the-century sexologists—a group portrait, a device that effectively reduces Freud to the sum of his associations. Not surprisingly, certain of these associations lend themselves more readily than others to Sulloway’s object of identifying the biological rationale lurking behind Freud’s thinking. But even those that prove recalcitrant in this regard nonetheless contribute to the subtle process of whittling Freud down to size. And if their intellectual significance fails to support Sulloway’s evolutionary argument, they often turn out to be useful in documenting personal failings on Freud’s part, thus casting doubt on his integrity, if not his originality.

Sulloway’s book is very much a matter of bits and pieces. He seeks to make his case through a close examination of individual documents, many of them written by persons other than Freud. Often his point hangs on an individual word or phrase, just as the spin that he puts on a given utterance depends on his choice of adjectives or operative verbs. All of this means that one can present his argument—or subject it to criticism—only through equally intimate attention to specific pieces of evidence and to the textual strategies Sulloway deploys to interpret them. His claims may be large, but his method of substantiating them is pointillistic. His book, in short, demands a close reading.

Ernst Brücke, Jean Martin Charcot, and Josef Breuer

One might expect Sulloway to make much of Freud’s years as a student and researcher in the laboratory of Ernst Brücke’s Physiological Institute, where from 1876 to 1882 Freud worked on biological problems set for him by Brücke. During these years Freud not only honed his knowledge of anatomy and physiology but came to identify himself with the ideals of nineteenth-century biological science, as embodied above all in the person of Ernst Brücke himself. For two reasons, however, Sulloway passes briskly over the Brücke period and makes no effort to enlist Freud’s biological apprenticeship in the cause of his revisionist thesis. First, Freud’s identification with Brücke and his early commitment to a career in biology are already fixed motifs in the received biographical tradition that Sulloway wishes to discredit. In fact, they are the necessary presuppositions of the conversion from biology to psychology that, in the familiar account, constitutes the central event in Freud’s intellectual biography. At best, then, Brücke is irrelevant to Sulloway’s argument, and he even poses a subtle threat insofar as he sets up the first term of a dichotomy that Sulloway hopes to collapse.

At the same time (and this is the second reason), Brücke stands for a conception of biology very different from the one Sulloway seeks to identify as the hidden rationale of Freud’s thought. Brücke, along with Emil du Bois-Reymond, Hermann Helmholtz, and Carl Ludwig, was a leading figure in the nineteenth-century effort to transform biology into a quantitative science by reducing it to the laws of chemistry and physics. As du Bois-Reymond expressed their ideal: “No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism.”^[2] This scientific philosophy is altogether foreign to the evolutionary vision Sulloway places at the heart of Freud’s biologism. Naturally, Sulloway must allow that Freud subscribed to the philosophy for a while, but it is as essential to Sulloway’s thesis as it is to the traditional account that Freud be seen as rejecting this hoary brand of positivism. Indeed, Brücke actually figures more prominently in Ernest Jones’s version of events than he does in Sulloway’s. In sum, Brücke is not a major player in Sulloway’s game of diminishment by association.

If Brücke is irrelevant to Sulloway’s strategy, Jean Martin Charcot is a positive obstacle. In the familiar biographical account, Freud’s period of study under the famous French neurologist in 1885–86 marks a turning point in his conversion to psychology. Charcot demonstrated that neurotic symptoms, such as hysterical paralyses, could be artificially induced by hypnosis. That is, individuals could be made to fall ill through purely mental stimuli. This revelation effectively collapsed the materialist assumptions of the medical tradition in which Freud had been trained. The mind, it seemed, could be the source of its own sickness.

Accordingly, the study under Charcot figures as a decisive moment in the canonical interpretation that sees Freud moving inexorably from a materialist to a psychological conception of the self. Sulloway, perforce, must do what he can to diffuse its significance. He adopts a three-pronged strategy. His first—and most disconcerting—procedure is to present a bland and utterly familiar recital of the Charcot experience, while refusing to acknowledge its obvious implications. Thus Sulloway quotes, without comment, Freud’s assertion of 1893 that “M. Charcot was the first to teach us that to explain hysterical neurosis we must apply to psychology.”^[3] Sensing, perhaps, that in so quoting Freud he has granted Charcot too much authority, Sulloway then seeks to play down his significance:

While it is true that Charcot’s influence introduced the young Viennese brain anatomist to a number of new and important psychological insights about psychoneurosis, one must be careful not to read more into this influence than was there at the time.…It would be fair to say that, while in Paris, Freud found Charcot’s ideas on hypnotism and hysteria as fascinating as he did precisely because they appealed to a long-standing personal interest in the subject of psychology. (49)

In other words, Charcot was little more than a diversion, a man who charmed Freud because his ideas happened to correspond to something innocuously referred to as “a long-standing personal interest in the subject of psychology”—the otherwise innocent adjective “personal” implying that psychology was for Freud more a hobby than a serious intellectual concern. This accomplished, Sulloway turns to one final tactic to avoid the traditional reading of the Charcot experience: he insists that it involved not a conversion to pure psychology but a reaffirmation of Freud’s sensible philosophical dualism. Charcot simply offered a corrective to the prejudices of Freud’s Viennese mentors, thereby confirming Freud’s natural inclination toward an evenhanded assessment of the claims of mind and body. “His interest in phenomena like hypnosis and hysteria was accompanied from the first by a balanced concern for the intricacies of the age-old mind-body problem” (51). Sulloway’s interpretation not only contradicts Freud’s own vivid account of the Charcot episode but ascribes to Freud a metaphysical judiciousness altogether foreign to his unphilosophical habit of mind. It reduces what was clearly an exciting and dramatic moment of intellectual transformation to a banal abstraction.

One further symptomatic feature of Sulloway’s discussion of the Charcot episode calls for comment, to wit, his treatment of the idea of the unconscious. In the traditional view, Charcot was important for Freud not only because he established the autonomy of the purely mental but also because his experiments showed that the mind was divided into conscious and unconscious parts. Again, Sulloway doesn’t deny this. He writes that Charcot’s “dramatic demonstrations—particularly those of hypnotism—first revealed to Freud the remarkable circumstance that multiple states of consciousness could simultaneously coexist in one and the same individual without either state apparently having knowledge of the other” (32). But Sulloway attaches no particular importance to this revelation and assigns it no special prominence in his account. On the contrary, it is allowed to sink amid a mass of further particulars, as he moves on to a detailed and not very consequential account of Freud’s opinion on the squabble between Charcot and Bernheim over the nature of hypnotic suggestion.

Why this indifference? It is especially striking in view of Sulloway’s own statement that Charcot was the first to teach Freud of “multiple states of consciousness” unknown to one another. The answer, quite simply, is that in Sulloway’s interpretation of Freud the unconscious counts for very little. To be sure, Sulloway mentions it from time to time, but he never acknowledges it as a central and revolutionary idea in Freud’s psychoanalytic conception of the self. Perhaps Sulloway thinks that, because the idea had been so richly anticipated by earlier thinkers, it is in no way distinctively Freudian. Or perhaps, himself a product of the late twentieth century, he finds the idea too familiar and obvious to require remark. In any event, the virtual disappearance of the unconscious as a subject in Freud’s intellectual history is the most remarkable elision in Sulloway’s book. One suspects, moreover, that it has been rendered invisible because Sulloway can find no way to make it fit his hypothesis of a hidden biological rationale. The unconscious, after all, belongs uncompromisingly to the realm of the psychological. Accordingly, it is neglected. I hardly need add that this neglect stands in stark contrast to Freud’s own assessment of its significance. The unconscious was for him his single most important contribution, an idea of truly epochal consequence, whose discovery he compared, in a famous passage, to the revolutions in thought brought about by Copernicus and Darwin before him. Just as Copernicus had removed humanity from the center of the universe and Darwin denied it any special place in the hierarchy of nature, so Freud himself, he boasted, had delivered an even more devastating insult to mankind’s self-confidence. “Human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.”^[4] In Sulloway’s interpretation, this “Freudian revolution” effectively collapses.

In contrast to his treatment of Freud’s experiences with Brücke and Charcot, Sulloway subjects his association with Josef Breuer to extensive analysis. In fact, it receives more attention than any of Freud’s relationships other than that with Fliess. (By comparison, the Freud-Jung relationship—of such great interest to the traditional biographies—is dispensed with in a brisk four pages.) The reason Breuer figures so prominently in Sulloway’s account is not, however, so readily discernible. Unlike Fliess, Breuer cannot be made to contribute to the central effort of identifying a hidden biological theme in Freud’s intellectual development. There is not a word here about “crypto-biology.” Rather, Breuer serves the more general purpose of revealing, by way of contrast, Freud’s distinctive intellectual style. At the same time, the collaboration between the two men follows a familiar pattern in which Freud first uses and then abuses a chosen friend and accomplice. It thus casts usefully invidious light on Freud’s character. But just as important, Sulloway finds in the orthodox account of the Breuer-Freud relationship an archetypal instance of the mythmaking propensity of the established biographical tradition. Breuer thus becomes “the first major victim of psychoanalytically reconstructed history” (100).

As in his treatment of Charcot, Sulloway considerably dulls the significance of the collaboration with Breuer for Freud’s conversion to an essentially psychological conception of mind. The case histories in their jointly authored Studies on Hysteria (1895) were important above all because they allowed Freud and Breuer to conclude that their patients’ illnesses derived from memories, which had been repressed at the time of the experience only to return, often years later, in the disguised form of symptoms. The theory, in other words, insists on the etiological power of the purely psychological, and it holds that a significant portion of mental life is unconscious. In this respect it was the logical extension of what Freud had learned about the autonomy of the psychological and the importance of the unconscious in his study of hypnotism under Charcot. In the traditional accounts of Freud’s intellectual development, Studies on Hysteria accordingly marks a milestone in his gradual abandonment of the materialist prejudices of his earlier mentors and his embrace of psychoanalysis proper. Indeed, it figures as his first truly psychoanalytic writing.

Not surprisingly, in Sulloway’s account this story is largely repressed. To speak precisely, it is confined to a single sentence. He quotes the famous conclusion from the book that “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,”^[5] to which he adds: “This was the fundamental clinical message of Breuer and Freud’s joint theory of hysteria” (61). But Sulloway has nothing more to say about the book’s central and most novel proposition. Instead, he immediately diverts attention by launching into an intricate discussion of the theory’s “psychophysicalist” assumptions concerning the investment and displacement of mental energy. In other words, Sulloway chooses to stress the book’s positivist language rather than its psychological substance: Studies on Hysteria becomes a book not about the persistence and transformation of recollection but about “a ‘short circuit’ in the normal flow of electric fluid” (62). The significance of Studies on Hysteria for the idea of the unconscious is similarly marginalized. The unconscious is demoted to a mere “aspect” of the theory—in fact, the last (and, presumably, least important) aspect. Again, the entire concept is dispensed with in a single sentence: “The last or topographical aspect of the Breuer-Freud theory of hysteria inheres in the hypothesis of an ‘unconscious’ portion of the mind” (64). Why the quotation marks around “unconscious” if not to cast doubt on its reality? Thus does the Freudian revolution end once more with a whimper.

Perhaps predictably, Sulloway’s account focuses as much on the breakup of the Freud-Breuer relationship as on its accomplishments. The dominant biographical tradition, Sulloway argues, has unfairly blamed their ultimate alienation on Breuer’s prudery, in particular on Breuer’s inability to accept Freud’s ideas about the role of sex in the origin of hysteria. Although on the whole Sulloway’s construction is defensible, the evidence is less conclusive than he thinks. Breuer, he shows, agreed with Freud that hysterical symptoms sometimes arise from the repression of a sexual trauma. The disagreement, as one might expect, was over just how often this is the case. Without ever actually saying so, Sulloway gives the impression that Breuer considered it a common occurrence: sexuality for Breuer was “one of the most important factors in hysteria” (79). But this formulation commits Breuer to no particular percentage; even as “one of the most important factors,” sexuality might still figure in less than the majority of cases. What is absolutely certain is that Freud considered sex the essential cause of every hysteria, whereas Breuer found this conclusion unacceptable. The question then becomes, Did Breuer break with Freud because he objected to Freud’s unjustified universalism or, as Freud himself came to believe, because of Breuer’s own resistance to the emphasis on sex?

There can be no simple answer: as already noted, the evidence calls for interpretation. One can reasonably argue that sexual considerations predominated, or that intellectual ones did, or that the two simply complemented each other. But Sulloway allows for no such interpretive ambiguity. For him the answer is obvious: because Breuer had been willing to acknowledge the sexual factor in some cases of hysteria, his real objection to Freud must have been intellectual. “The estrangement between Breuer and Freud was, more than anything else, simply a matter of incompatible scientific styles” (98–99).

Sulloway’s treatment of this matter of antithetical styles is revealing. He introduces the distinction as if it were entirely disinterested. Scientists come in two varieties: the circumspect and the bold, neither one more legitimate than the other. Thus, if Freud practiced a “more visionary style” (86) of science than the careful Breuer, this reflects no discredit on Freud. It merely means that he “feared mediocrity…more than he feared error” (87).

Examined more closely, however, Sulloway’s seemingly neutral distinction turns out to be profoundly invidious. His prose undergoes a rhetorical sea change, by which Breuer’s caution comes to appear decidedly more admirable than Freud’s vision. The effect resembles the return of the repressed, as Sulloway’s latent hostility to Freud eventually overwhelms his manifest (and official) evenhandedness. Thus “the much-misunderstood Josef Breuer” (83) is described as “meticulous” (53), “systematic” (56), “painstaking” and “unassuming” (83), and a physician of “unusual diligence, perspicacity, and extreme patience” (64). Never does Sulloway suggest that Breuer’s caution might at times have become plodding unimaginativeness. By contrast, Freud’s “visionary style” is quickly deconstructed into a series of much less attractive qualities. Unlike Breuer, Freud suffered from “pent-up frustrations and the associated capacity for fanaticism” (83); he sought “rigid and incontrovertible laws” in keeping with his “more dogmatic and revolutionary” image of himself (99); he indulged in “extremist and speculative” hypotheses (86); and he exhibited a “fanatical propensity for exclusive scientific formulation” (99). Bit by bit, the image of Freud as visionary gives way to repeated assertions of his “growing fanaticism” (89). Sulloway himself may pretend to take no sides in the matter of scientific styles, but his language serves to rehabilitate Breuer and discredit Freud.

The purely intellectual difference between Freud and Breuer is underscored by an even more unflattering personal comparison of the two. Breuer, it turns out, was not only careful but nice. He was “generous and even-tempered” (83) and “widely esteemed as an unusually selfless and warm-hearted individual” (54). He even subsidized Freud. Freud, however, was hard and unforgiving. Rather than accept the legitimacy of Breuer’s intellectual reservations, he let his former affection turn to hate:

By 1897, Freud was telling Fliess that the very sight of Breuer would make him want to emigrate, and he even took to avoiding Breuer’s neighborhood for fear of having to meet him on the street. Many years later Breuer’s daughter recalled just such an accidental meeting between the two men when she and her father, now elderly, were out walking one day. Breuer instinctively threw open his arms, while Freud, head down and doing his best to ignore his old friend, marched briskly by.^[6] (99)

Even allowing for a certain amount of dramatic license on the part of Breuer’s daughter, the picture is not an attractive one. We are left with the impression that, characterologically as well as intellectually, it was better to be Josef Breuer than Sigmund Freud.

Wilhelm Fliess

With Wilhelm Fliess we come to the key figure in Sulloway’s reinterpretation. Fliess is more important than Brücke, Charcot, or Breuer, first, because he was Freud’s closest friend and interlocutor during “the period of Freud’s most creative intellectual achievements” (xiv) in the 1890s and, second, because he provided Freud with the specific evolutionary ideas that form the hidden core of psychoanalytic theory:

The long-misunderstood role of Fliess in Freud’s intellectual life reflects, in microcosm, the crypto-biological nature of Freud’s entire psychoanalytic legacy to the twentieth century. For it was precisely this new evolutionary vision that…exerted the greatest single and most far-reaching theoretical influence upon Freud’s conception of human psychosexual development. (237)

Freud’s relationship with Fliess thus forms the heart of Sulloway’s thesis.

By focusing on Fliess, Sulloway attacks the received biographical tradition at perhaps its most vulnerable point. Ernest Jones, for example, begins his treatment of the Fliess episode with the revealing assertion: “We come here to the only really extraordinary experience in Freud’s life.”^[7] Fliess is an embarrassment for Freud’s psychoanalytic biographers because his ideas seem so extravagant, yet there can be no denying that Freud valued him immensely and, for many years, professed nothing but the greatest enthusiasm for his strange notions. Fliess thus threatens Freud’s intellectual respectability: if Freud could admire such manifestly outrageous notions, does this not imply that his own system was constructed of similarly suspect materials—that psychoanalysis is just as much a pseudoscience as Fliess’s outlandish theories about the relation of the nose to sexuality and the pervasive influence of the numbers 23 and 28? The orthodox solution to this predicament has been to stress the obvious madness of Fliess’s ideas and then to insist that, precisely because his ideas were so bizarre, they could never have appealed to Freud on purely intellectual grounds. Instead, the relationship can be explained only by way of personal, indeed psychological, considerations. In commonsense terms, this view holds that Fliess offered a much-needed source of encouragement in the years when Freud was making his revolutionary intellectual breakthroughs and felt most isolated from the scientific community. In psychoanalytic terms, the association has been interpreted as a transference relationship, in which Fliess assumed the role of Freud’s father. Like any classic Oedipal drama, it entailed a period of uncritical admiration and dependence followed by an inevitable alienation, which began—so the theory goes—when Freud’s self-analysis revealed the idea of the Oedipus complex. Only through this insight was Freud finally liberated from Fliess.

Sulloway seeks to render this line of reasoning superfluous by arguing that Freud’s dependence on Fliess can be explained entirely on rational, intellectual grounds. Sulloway recognizes that his contention requires that he rehabilitate Fliess as a thinker, and he accordingly devotes practically a full chapter of his book to this enterprise. It is in many respects an astonishing display of erudition. Sulloway takes up each of Fliess’s supposedly crazy ideas and shows, first, that Fliess was not alone among his contemporaries in championing such notions and, second, that none of the ideas is nearly so outlandish as the orthodox biographers have maintained. Furthermore, Sulloway insists that Fliess’s favorite notions were all informed by an evolutionary logic, even if that logic was sometimes strained or has proved faulty in the light of subsequent research. Sulloway’s exposition of Fliess’s thought thus also contributes to his larger strategy of revealing the hidden biological rationale of psychoanalysis. Sulloway’s solicitude for Fliess’s reputation and his ingenuity in finding Darwinian excuses for Fliess’s theories are so impressive that one almost feels he should have written Fliess’s biography rather than Freud’s. The ultimate effect of this “rehabilitation,” not incidentally, is to bring Freud down to Fliess’s level—to obliterate any sense that Freud and Fliess, as thinkers, are categorically distinct.

Like the traditional biographers, Sulloway sees Fliess as preoccupied with three ideas. First, he insists that there is a crucial physiological connection between the nose and the female genitals; in particular, the nose contains “genital zones” linked to sexual and reproductive functions—from which it follows that sexual disorders can be treated by anesthetizing the offending spot in the nose with cocaine. Second, “vital periodicities” govern all physiological processes, such that life can ultimately be explained in terms of two numbers, 23 and 28, the former being the masculine principle and the latter the feminine. Finally, all human beings are bisexual, and thus the periodicities governed by 23 and 28 are observable in both sexes.

Sulloway shows that none of these ideas—not even the numerological fantasy concerning 23 and 28—was unique to Fliess. Take the matter of the nose and sex. Sulloway finds that a perfectly respectable Baltimore laryngologist, John Noland Mackenzie, had already proposed such a connection back in the 1880s. In fact, when Fliess’s theory appeared in 1897, Mackenzie greeted it enthusiastically as a confirmation of his own ideas. By the end of the century, “the Mackenzie-Fliess naso-genital theory,” according to Sulloway, “had come to be a common topic of discussion among rhinologists” (150) and was embraced by no less an authority than Richard von Krafft-Ebing, as well as by the “ever-cautious” (151) Josef Breuer. Most of the evidence that Fliess, Mackenzie, and others cited in support of the theory was clinical—such as nasal bleeding or swelling during menstruation or during sexual arousal. For purposes of Sulloway’s thesis, however, the really important features of the theory were evolutionary, notably the phylogenetic implications of the link between sexuality and the sense of smell in the lower animals. The nose-genital connection begins to take on a kind of Darwinian sense if one views it as a residue in human beings of the olfactory sexuality of our animal ancestors. Sulloway thus emphasizes “the general evolutionary context in which Fliess’s theories were discussed” (150), concluding that there was an “important grain of scientific truth in Fliess’s now-defunct nasal theories” (152).

The notion of vital periodicities was, if anything, even more popular among turn-of-the-century scientists, and for exactly the same reasons. Fliess’s “scientific interests in vital and sexual periodicity were becoming positively fashionable by the mid-1890s” (152–53). Sulloway discusses the work of more than a half-dozen figures—including Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing—who contributed to the idea’s prestige. With a view to his larger thesis, Sulloway stresses in particular the attention Charles Darwin bestowed on it. Darwin recognized a wide variety of periodic processes in nature and was especially fascinated by weekly cycles and their multiples, which he found “in virtually all temporal aspects of growth, reproduction, and disease known to life science” (153). Naturally, Darwin sought to interpret these periodic phenomena in evolutionary terms. To be precise, he connected them with the rhythm of the tides, arguing that they were phylogenetic residues from our tidal-dependent marine ancestors.

Even Fliess’s chosen numbers, 23 and 28, found other scientific advocates. In the case of the “female” number, 28, this is not especially remarkable. It is based on the menstrual cycle, which in turn is grounded in the 28-day lunar period and thus can be linked to the evolutionary argument about our tidal heritage. But Sulloway’s most spectacular find is the Scotsman John Beard, another nineteenth-century scientist, who, independently of Fliess but virtually simultaneously, propounded the existence of a 23-day cycle. The argument here involves a convoluted piece of reasoning concerning patterns of ovulation and gestation. But Sulloway’s point is the same: Fliess’s idea was not unique and was, moreover, grounded in evolutionary logic, even if Beard’s presentation of that logic was more explicit than Fliess’s.

Sulloway’s discussion of Fliess’s third preoccupation, bisexuality, is much briefer. I suspect this is because the notion has never been considered as bizarre as Fliess’s other idées fixes. On the contrary, among Fliess’s many notions, it alone survived to become an important tenet of mature psychoanalytic theory, a debt Freud acknowledges in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. It is thus not a candidate for rehabilitation, unlike the naso-genital theory or the idea of vital periodicity. Still, Sulloway documents its vogue and stresses its grounding in embryology (the sexual organs of both sexes are visible in the early stages of embryonic development) and in evolutionary theory—notably in Darwin’s conclusion, in The Descent of Man, that a distant ancestor of the vertebrates may have been androgynous.

In short, in Sulloway’s view, Fliess was a solid scientific citizen of his age, his ideas resting on widely accepted evolutionary convictions. More than a solid citizen: his work placed him on the cutting edge of contemporary science. “There was,” Sulloway concludes,

enough method and consistency to Fliess’s madness to convince many—Sigmund Freud included—from a whole generation of scientific contemporaries that he had made a series of profound scientific discoveries. Above all, to those contemporaries who shared Fliess’s biological assumptions, his ideas seemed to occupy the visionary forefront, not the lunatic fringe, of “hard” science. (169)

Having established to his satisfaction that Fliess was not a crackpot but a reputable scientist—one whose intellectual credentials were fully worthy of Freud’s respect—Sulloway turns to the specific evidence of his influence on Freud. He does not belabor Freud’s express admiration for Fliess’s ideas, because the orthodox biographical tradition has already conceded the point. Nor is his effort primarily directed to arguing that those ideas—other than bisexuality—found a significant place in psychoanalytic theory, because transparently they did not. Rather, Sulloway marshals his forces essentially along two fronts. First, through a close reading of Fliess’s 1897 monograph Die Beziehungen zwischen Nase und weiblichen Geschlectsorganen, he tries to show that several of Freud’s most important psychoanalytic concepts, above all the idea of infantile sexuality, were propounded by Fliess before they were by Freud. Second, through an equally close reading of Freud’s letters to Fliess, he claims to discover direct evidence that Freud adopted or modified Fliessian themes into recognizably psychoanalytic form. In both efforts Sulloway stresses that Freud’s intellectual affinities with Fliess rested on a shared evolutionary point of view. “As for Fliess’s influence upon Freud,” Sulloway writes, “it was the physiological and particularly evolutionary framework implicit in Fliess’s ideas that led Freud to take him so seriously” (170). This two-pronged tactic—showing how Fliess anticipated Freud and Freud adapted Fliess—stands at the argumentative heart of Sulloway’s book. It aims to prove nothing less than that psychoanalysis was, in essence, a “transforma tion of the Fliessian id” (171).

Let us begin with the matter of Fliess’s anticipation of Freud in his monograph of 1897. Before we consider the specific instances of anticipation that Sulloway advances, however, we need to note the dubious logic upon which the entire enterprise rests. Sulloway claims that whenever Fliess’s remarks in the monograph express views that later became part of psychoanalytic theory, they illustrate “the impact of Fliess’s influence” (173) on Freud. But, of course, this is not necessarily the case. For one thing, even though Freud published a particular idea after Fliess, Freud may well have developed the idea on his own, or have taken it from a source other than Fliess. Equally plausible, Fliess may have heard the idea from Freud in one of their many meetings, or “congresses.” Sulloway raises this possibility himself and tries to diffuse it by retreating from his bold claim of influence to the softer notion of collaboration: “Putting aside for the moment the more technical issue of who really influenced whom (and how), it is still true that many of the ideas embodied in Fliess’s published discussions of human psychosexual development constitute an important and much-neglected collaborative phase through which Freud’s thinking likewise passed” (188–89). But this modulation of his argument has little effect on the way Sulloway presents his case. Throughout the text he speaks as if the presence of “Freudian” themes in Fliess’s book offer unambiguous proof of influence and thus justify Sulloway’s characterization of psychoanalysis as, at bottom, a transformation of Fliessian sexual biology.

Sulloway’s argument, then, fails to do justice to the complexity of the notion of influence or to its evidentiary demands. But leaving this thorny matter aside for the moment, what evidence does he present that Fliess in fact anticipated Freud? I’m afraid the answer is, considerably less than he promises. With a characteristic show of precision Sulloway announces that Fliess’s imprint on psychoanalysis can be detected “at five important points” (173). Several of these points, however, turn out to be less impressive than his assertion would lead us to expect. One of the five points, for example, is bisexuality. But, of course, this influence was conceded by Freud himself and has never been denied by his biographers—so while it’s true, it’s not news. A second point is the “periodic ebb and flow” (179) of libidinal development. As we know, this was certainly a major concern of Fliess’s, and in his correspondence with Fliess, Freud sometimes supplied corroboration for Fliess’s periodic calculations (as, for example, when Freud sent information about his wife’s menstrual pattern and the birth of his daughter Anna). But the fact remains that the idea of periodicity plays no role in Freud’s mature thought, and Sulloway can find only the most fugitive allusions to it in the canonical writings. A third point is the notion that childhood masturbation was psychologically harmful. Without question Freud believed this to be true, but it figures only as a residual idea in psychoanalytic theory, namely, in the etiology of the so-called actual neuroses, an increasingly neglected category in Freud’s thinking after 1900. The idea, in other words, is hardly a central tenet of the mature Freudian system. More important, it is clearly a Victorian leftover in both Freud and Fliess; Sulloway himself admits that it represents “more a conceptual overlap than an instance…of Fliess’s direct influence upon Freud” (184).

The five points thus quickly reduce themselves to two, and these two—the ideas of a latency period and of childhood erotogenic zones—are really components of a single theme, infantile sexuality. Here, at last, we have a genuinely Freudian idea, one of absolute centrality to psychoanalytic theory. Indeed, infantile sexuality is, with the unconscious, one of the two intellectual pillars of psychoanalysis. And while we stumble on bits and pieces of the idea in a number of other thinkers (to whom Sulloway turns in his chapter on sexologists), no one gave it the systematic articulation and conceptual prominence that Freud did. If Sulloway can find infantile sexuality, in the Freudian sense, in the pages of Fliess’s 1897 monograph, he will have scored an undeniable coup, one that would render at least plausible his thesis about Fliess’s role in the emergence of psychoanalytic theory. When I say “in a Freudian sense,” I mean not merely the proposition that children are sexual creatures (that they masturbate, become genitally aroused, and so on), but the more radical proposition that their pursuit of oral and anal pleasure must also be regarded as erotic, indeed as significant sexual organizations in a development pattern leading from polymorphous perversity, through the pregenital stages, to the supremacy of genital sexuality at puberty. What evidence of a conception of this sort does Sulloway uncover in Fliess’s monograph?

The answer has to be, at most a few scraps. Sulloway argues, for example, that Fliess’s theory of vital periodicity necessarily committed him to a belief in infantile sexuality, because, according to the theory, both the 23- and 28-day cycles were present in every individual throughout life. This may make infantile sexuality a logical necessity for Fliess, but such a fragile inference can hardly support so imposing an edifice as Freud’s mature conception. Nor is what Fliess has to say about childhood erections (whose supposedly periodic occurrences, observed in his son Robert, figure in his argument) distinctly Freudian. More to the point are Fliess’s remarks about the sexual significance of oral and anal activities. On the oral side, Sulloway is able to cite one passage that has a distinctly Freudian ring:

I would just like to point out that the sucking movements that small children make with their lips and tongue on periodic days…, the so-called “Ludeln,” as well as thumb-sucking, must be considered as an equivalent of masturbation. Such activity likewise brings on anxiety, sometimes combined with neurasthenia, just as does true masturbation. It comes on impulsively and is, on this account, so difficult to wean children from.…The role which the word “sweet” [süß] later plays in the language of love has its initial physiological root here. With lips and tongue the child first tastes lactose [Milchzucker] at his mother’s breast, and they provide him with his earliest experience of satisfaction. (173–74)

This may well be an honest anticipation of Freud, but the following caveats need to be entered. First, the observation is an aside, introduced offhandedly with “I would just like to point out” and confined to a footnote in the text. Second, although it makes the essential Freudian link between oral and genital gratification (sucking, Fliess says, is the equivalent of masturbation), so casual an aperçu is, conceptually speaking, light-years removed from the idea of an oral phase of libidinal development, such as Freud was to propose. Finally, here as elsewhere in the monograph, Fliess’s real interest is in periodicity, and he latches onto infantile sucking, like infantile masturbation, as one among many phenomena that he believes to be grist for his periodic mill.

After orality, the second great test of a genuinely Freudian conception of infantile sexuality is anality. Sulloway asserts confidently that Fliess was “convinced of a close physiological tie between the anal excretory function and the sexual manifestations of children” (174). Unfortunately, the two pieces of evidence Sulloway invokes fail to support this contention. The first is Fliess’s “careful documentation of periodic patterns of bowel functioning in childhood” (174–75). True enough, as with anything arguably periodic, Fliess does discuss children’s bowel movements. In contrast to his distinctly Freudian comparison of sucking and masturbation, however, nothing in his text identifies bowel movements as sexual—apart, of course, from the generic assumption that anything periodic is in some sense sexual. Second, Sulloway argues that Fliess “stood on Freudian ground when he drew a connection in his sexual theory between hemorrhoids in adults and those ‘reflex-neuroses’ associated with the reproductive system” (175). Once again, plausible enough, but just as there is no mention of sexuality in connection with bowel movements, there is no mention of childhood here. The telltale Freudian link, in other words, is missing.

There is perhaps more to Sulloway’s contention that Fliess anticipated Freud’s conception of a latency period. Latency is, essentially, the concept Freud uses to explain why infantile sexuality undergoes a hiatus between the fifth year and puberty. This is brought about by two psychic mechanisms: reaction formation, namely, the emergence of shame and disgust, and sublimation, which reflects, as Freud puts it, “the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals.”^[8] In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud acknowledges Fliess as the source of the phrase “period of sexual latency.”^[9] Sulloway, however, argues that not just the phrase but the idea itself came from Fliess. Clearly, Fliess’s belief that human beings function as a closed energy system, whose underlying chemical-sexual stuff is governed by numerical cycles, logically entailed the idea of sublimation. Moreover, Fliess especially associated the process with childhood, when the energy that would later go into sexual life was directed toward growth. But Fliess’s “latency period,” unlike Freud’s, began not in the fifth year but at conception. Indeed, Fliess’s notion that the whole of childhood was governed by sublimation not only differs from Freud’s idea of latency but contradicts the very conception of infantile sexuality, which holds precisely that sublimation is not in effect during the earliest years of childhood. Moreover, the general notion of sublimation was hardly unique either to Freud or to Fliess. As Sulloway himself points out—in a footnote—“both the term and the concept were already in common circulation in Freud’s day, and they may be traced to Novalis, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, among others” (176n).

Sulloway’s long discussion of the Freudian ideas supposedly anticipated in Fliess’s monograph turns out, then, to be so much sound and fury signifying, if not nothing, then remarkably little. In particular, his claim for Fliess’s “systematic and, in many respects, pioneering investigations concerning the existence and the causes of childhood sexuality” (171) is wildly overstated. The very paucity of his evidence makes it seem more likely that, far from being a systematic pioneer, Fliess picked up and repeated these stray notions about sex and childhood from Freud or from other contemporary students of sexuality. Sulloway professes to be shocked “that not a single word has been uttered in the voluminous secondary literature on Freud concerning Fliess’s discoveries on this most Freudian of topics” (171). But the silence is hardly surprising. Only desperate ingenuity has enabled Sulloway to fashion his intricate intellectual edifice—a kind of conceptual Rube Goldberg structure—according to which Freud’s mature theory can be found, in embryo, in Fliess’s monograph. Examined closely, it collapses like the proverbial house of cards.

If Fliess was not a Freudian, what about the possibility that Freud was a Fliessian? That is, what of Sulloway’s second strategy, his close reading of Freud’s correspondence with Fliess, intended to extract evidence of Freud’s adapting or “transforming” Fliessian ideas into recognizably psychoanalytic form? The notion of “transformation,” like that of “cooperation,” serves as a hedge on the more adamantine concept of “influence.” It thus introduces a certain elasticity, even slipperiness, into Sulloway’s argument. Moreover, the enterprise results in some of the densest, most elusive pages in Sulloway’s book. They will require patient scrutiny if we are to judge the merits of his case.

Just as he earlier purported to find five points at which Fliess’s 1897 monograph anticipates Freud, Sulloway now asserts that Freud’s intellectual transformation of Fliess, as revealed in the letters, involves “three major elements”:

(1) Freud’s attempts, actively encouraged by Fliess, to use the theories of periodicity and bisexuality to map out various “critical stages” in the development of human psychosexual organization; (2) Freud’s speculations on the relationship between “organic” repression, bisexuality, and the sense of smell; and (3) his gradual insight into the phantasy life of neurotics, especially its dynamic psychoanalytic relationship to the developing id. (194)

In order to assess these “elements,” we must put two questions to each of them. First, does the particular item represent a psychoanalytic breakthrough—an idea that we encounter in Freud’s mature thought, or, if not that, at least a significant step in the direction of such an idea? In other words, is it recognizably Freudian? Second, is the idea clearly inspired by Fliessian considerations (the nose-genital link, the calculus of vital periodicities, or bisexuality), thus qualifying it as a “transformation”? One should also attend to a third consideration, namely, whether the idea is informed by phylogenetic or evolutionary concerns, because this speaks to the larger claim of Sulloway’s book regarding the central role of biological reasoning in Freud’s thought.

(1) Mapping Out “Critical Stages” in Psychosexual Development.

Sulloway’s discussion of this first matter is based on Freud’s letter of December 6, 1896, a letter, Sulloway says, that “adumbrates a number of Freud’s most important insights into human psychosexuality” (196). The “critical stages” in psychosexual development are not, be it noted, the oral, anal, and phallic phases that would later form the core of Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality. Rather, Sulloway is referring to a scheme Freud proposed connecting particular neuroses to sexual experiences at specific ages. To be precise, Freud links hysteria to repressed sexual experiences that occurred between the ages of 1 and 4 years, obsessional neurosis to experiences between the ages of 4 and 8, and paranoia to experiences between the ages of 8 and 14. Can this idea be reckoned a major psychoanalytic breakthrough? Perhaps it can, in the broad structural sense that it posits a developmental pattern organized in terms of stages. But neither the age categories nor their association with particular neuroses would survive into mature psychoanalytic theory. In other words, it has the general form, but not the specific content, of Freud’s later conception.

The scheme, then, is arguably proto-Freudian. But is it also Fliessian? Here Sulloway makes what is probably his strongest case. Although Freud most likely arrived at the scheme on the basis of his clinical experiences and hunches, he seeks in the December 6 letter to explain it (or, better, rationalize it) in terms of Fliess’s hypothesis of 23- and 28-day cycles—to provide his psychic “superstructure,” as Freud puts it, with “organic foundations.”^[10] In a series of obscure calculations that rival anything in Fliess (and which the original editors of the correspondence chose to suppress), Freud tries to persuade himself that his age categories can indeed be understood as multiples of Fliess’s two numbers. His argument is also Fliessian in a second sense: it draws on Fliess’s conception of bisexuality, specifically the notion of a 23-day “male substance” and a 28-day “female substance,” the former equated by Freud with pleasure, the latter with repression. I would note, however, that these specifically Fliessian notions are used mainly to justify the critical ages in Freud’s scheme: 1, 4, 8, and 14. That is, they are used to support precisely the elements that he would later discard. The conviction that psychic life unfolds by stages clearly preceded these calculations; it was an idea Freud had been moving toward (independently of periodicity and bisexuality) for some time. The December 6 letter, then, doesn’t really support Sulloway’s conclusion that “the theories of bisexuality and biorhythmic development fruitfully directed Freud’s psychoanalytic attention toward possible critical stages in infantile psychosexual development” (198). A more plausible reading would be that the letter shows Freud struggling toward a developmental conception of psychosexual life, making a false landing on this particular scheme, and grasping at Fliess’s periodic calculations in an effort to stabilize his somewhat shaky trial balloon.

The December 6 letter offers stronger support for a different contention of Sulloway’s. In the letter, Freud seems to use Fliessian reasoning to arrive at the notion that the neuroses are the “negative” of the perversions. Here is an idea that would find a permanent place in psychoanalytic thought. In the Three Essays, Freud writes: “Symptoms are formed in part at the cost of abnormal sexuality; neuroses are, so to say, the negative of perversions.”^[11] In other words, Freud believed that when childhood sexual experiences are repressed, they return as neurotic symptoms, whereas when they are simply responded to pleasurably and acted upon, the individual escapes illness, so to speak, by becoming a pervert. Needless to say, the theory faces the difficulty of explaining why some early sexual experiences are repressed while others are acted upon. A passage from the December 6 letter, which Sulloway cites, seeks to cast light on this mystery by way of Fliess’s notions of bisexuality and of male and female sexual substances:

In order to account for why the outcome [of premature sexual experience] is sometimes perversion and sometimes neurosis, I avail myself of the bisexuality of all human beings. In a purely male being there would be a surplus of male release at the two sexual boundaries [i.e., ages 4 and 8]—that is, pleasure would be generated and consequently perversion; in purely female beings there would be a surplus of unpleasurable substance at these times. In the first phases the releases would be parallel: that is, they would produce a normal surplus of pleasure. This would explain the preference of true females for neuroses of defense.^[12]

The reasoning is less than entirely lucid, and it depends on Freud’s decision, not further explained, to equate Fliess’s male substance with pleasure and his female substance with repression. (A year later, in the letter of November 14, Freud says that he has given up this equation.) But the passage strongly suggests that Fliessian assumptions played a role in Freud’s thinking about the perversions. Perhaps this is not so surprising when one recalls that the perversions were always associated in Freud’s mind (as in the minds of many contemporary sexologists) with the idea of bisexuality, for which Freud acknowledged his debt to Fliess.

(2) “Organic” Repression and the Sense of Smell.

Sulloway’s discussion of this issue turns largely on Freud’s letter of November 14, 1897, which Sulloway calls “fascinating and, in general, insufficiently appreciated” (203). The key item in the letter is the idea of “abandoned erotogenic zones,” a notion that was to remain part of psychoanalytic theory in its mature form. Abandoned erotogenic zones are areas of the body—Freud mentions the anus, the mouth, and the throat—that are important sources of sexual gratification in childhood but cease to be such in normal adults. “We must assume,” Freud writes, “that in infancy the release of sexuality is not yet so much localized as it is later, so that the zones which are later abandoned (and perhaps the whole surface of the body as well) also instigate something that is analogous to the later release of sexuality.”^[13] In the November 14 letter Freud has not yet connected these zones to a specific chronological scheme, although Sulloway tries to give the impression that he has. The idea, then, while decidedly psychoanalytic, has not achieved its classic form.

Sulloway argues that the notion of abandoned erotogenic zones was “Fliessian inspired” (198). He makes this assertion in part because, when Freud first mentions the idea (in the letter of December 6, 1896), he alludes to Fliess’s “28-day anxiety substance.”^[14] But, for Sulloway, there is more important evidence. Freud ties the abandonment of erotogenic zones after childhood to an evolutionary speculation about the repression of the sense of smell, which took place when mankind adopted upright posture. The notion of abandoned sexual zones, Freud hazards parenthetically, may be “linked to the changed part played by sensations of smell: upright walking, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth becoming repulsive—by a process still unknown to me.”^[15] This phylogenetic hypothesis seems to imply that childhood erotogenic zones might be thought of as the residue of our one-time olfactory sexuality, just as the abandoning of these zones as the child grows up recapitulates the process by which the race gave up the nose as an important source of sexual stimulation when it adopted erect posture. The emergence of a sense of shame would thus appear to have an evolutionary basis: repression, in this sense, is at least partly organic.

For Sulloway this line of reasoning is Fliessian—rather than merely evolutionary—because of the role it ascribes to the nose, that quintessentially Fliessian organ. He stresses that Freud’s argument “focused upon the nose,” which for Fliess was not merely a “sex-linked organ” but “an erotogenic zone par excellence” (198). Yet what is striking about Freud’s discussion, one could argue, is that he does not mention the nose as an erotogenic zone, abandoned or otherwise, but only the anus, mouth, and throat. Still, I am inclined to agree that Freud’s phylogenetic speculation has a decidedly Fliessian ring. The more important question concerns just how central a place one should assign to the idea in Freud’s thinking. It surfaces again in the Rat Man case and in Civilization and Its Discontents, where Sulloway places it at the very center of Freud’s theory of culture. But, as it does in both its later incarnations, the idea appears in the letter of 1897 as an aside, a parenthetical speculation, one that admittedly adds an evolutionary dimension to the argument but hardly establishes itself as a foundational assumption on which the entire Freudian ed ifice would be built. Thus Sulloway’s conclusion that Freud “seized upon the sense of smell as a major agent in the developmental processes of reaction formation and repression” (199) seems exaggerated.

(3) The Fantasy Life of Neurotics.

This is, for Sulloway, the least important of the three allegedly Fliessian transformations, and his argument for it is correspondingly more tentative. What he is concerned with here is Freud’s decision to abandon the seduction theory and replace it with the idea of children’s seduction fantasies. In a very general sense, he wants to associate the collapse of the seduction theory with Fliess’s influence because he views Fliess as the spokesman for spontaneous infantile sexuality. Here, however, Sulloway seeks to identify a more specific derivation, namely, a Fliessian source for the notion that repressed sexual impulses in childhood can give rise to neurotic fantasies, including fantasies of seduction. “While I do not wish to downplay, by any means, the magnitude of Freud’s personal achievement in reaching this last insight, I am also inclined to count it among the most important of the post-Project derivatives of his scientific relationship with Fliess” (205). The assertion is appropriately hedged.

The only evidence Sulloway can adduce to support his idea are two passing allusions to something “chemical” in Freud’s discussion of neurotic fantasies. From a document labeled “Draft M” by the editors of the Project (and dated May 25, 1897), Sulloway quotes Freud as saying that hysterical fantasies arise “automatically (by a chemical process)” (205). (Freud’s actual statement is rather more circumspect: he writes that fantasies “seem to have arisen, as it were, automatically [by a chemical process].”)^[16] Sulloway also quotes another sentence from the same draft in which Freud proposes a chemical analogy: “Phantasies are constructed by a process of fusion and distortion analogous to the decomposition of a chemical body which is combined with another one” (205), which prompts the following ejaculation on Sulloway’s part: “Not a far distant shade, I submit, of Wilhelm Fliess’s two combining bisexual substances!” (205). That’s the sum of Sulloway’s hard evidence, which amounts only to saying that Freud’s analogies perhaps bear a resemblance to Fliess’s sexual substances. The proposition—to put the best possible light on it—can only be called shadowy.

At what general conclusion, then, can we arrive regarding Sulloway’s contention that psychoanalysis is a transformation of the Fliessian id? Clearly, in my view the case is very weak. The assortment of ideas on which Sulloway lavishes such attention—the “critical stages,” the perversions as the negative of the neuroses, the repression of the sense of smell, and the chemistry of neurotic fantasies—simply does not add up to “psychoanalysis.” Some of the ideas (the critical stages, the chemistry of fantasies) find no place in Freud’s later thinking, while others (the perversions as the negative of the neuroses, the repression of the sense of smell) are authentically psychoanalytic but far from central pillars of the doctrine. Moreover, many, indeed most, of the ideas essential to mature psychoanalytic theory are entirely absent from Sulloway’s collection. At the same time, Sulloway’s effort to give the ideas he does discuss a Fliessian reading is often labored, and hence unpersuasive. A sense of intellectual strain—of looking for a needle in a haystack—is evident throughout. Not surprisingly, his argument is extraordinarily difficult to remember. This is not merely because Sulloway overwhelms the reader with detail but because all that detail finally bears such a tenuous link to his conclusions.

In the end, Sulloway fundamentally misrepresents the relationship between Freud and Fliess when he treats it as a partnership of equals. Freud’s letters to Fliess convey the impression of a singularly one-sided conversation—almost a monologue—with Freud showing just enough interest in Fliess’s ideas to keep the latter listening. Fliess was essentially a sounding board, a sympathetic ear, who indulged Freud’s elaborate, self-absorbed, and often fumbling expositions of his emerging theories (along with the letters, Freud sent Fliess more than a dozen drafts, including the book-length Project for a Scientific Psychology). Of course, Fliess’s responses, if we had them, would no doubt modify our sense of the degree to which Freud dominated the conversation. But I doubt they would tip the scales altogether. Likewise, I also suspect that the many meetings or “congresses” between Freud and Fliess on the occasion of their summer holidays found Freud doing the lion’s share of the talking. Freud, after all, was a genius and a person of boundless self-confidence. Whatever Fliess’s intellectual merits, they could hardly overcome the categorical distance separating the two men.

To grant Sulloway his due, he makes a plausible case for Fliess’s having exercised a more substantial intellectual (as opposed to psychological) influence on Freud than a devoted psychoanalytic biographer like Ernest Jones would allow. But Jones represents the extreme case. Other psychoanalytic historians, such as Kurt Eissler and Didier Anzieu, while not going so far as Sulloway, have been willing to grant Fliess a role in Freud’s intellectual development. Anzieu—the author of an exhaustive study of Freud’s self-analysis—calls Jones’s contempt for Fliess “distinctly unfair” and concludes boldly: “Had it not been for Fliess, psychoanalysis would probably not have been discovered.”^[17]

Finally, the significance of Fliess for Sulloway’s overarching proposition that psychoanalysis is at bottom an evolutionary science—that Freud was a “biologist of the mind”—remains equivocal. For Sulloway’s case to persuade, we must accept not only that Fliess’s influence was substantial but that anything Fliessian is fundamentally evolutionary. Because, however, Sulloway succeeds only partially in giving Fliess’s ideas an evolutionary reading, the attempt to transform Freud into a psychobiologist by virtue of Fliess is, one might say, doubly derivative. Far easier to regard Freud and Fliess, like most scientists of their day, as equally immersed in a Darwinian intellectual culture. Indeed, Sulloway himself argues as much in the chapter of his book on Freud and Darwin. In other words, one does not need Fliess to explain Freud’s interest in evolutionary biology. The sole point at which Fliess’s influence may have proved decisive is Freud’s phylogenetic speculation, in the letter of November 14, 1897, about the suppression of the sense of smell. But Sulloway’s efforts to promote this idea into one of the central precepts of psychoanalysis (rather than merely an obiter dictum) seems, at best, idiosyncratic.

Sulloway concludes his treatment of Fliess with a long discussion of the alienation that ultimately set in between the two men. In contrast to the standard psychoanalytic account, he argues that Fliess, rather than Freud, initiated the break. More important, he rejects the notion that the end of the friendship can be explained in terms of Freud’s overcoming his Oedipal transference to Fliess or by his suddenly recognizing the pseudoscientific nature of Fliess’s ideas. Rather, Sulloway says, the real cause of the alienation was Freud’s ambition: when Freud gave up the seduction theory and embraced instead the notion of infantile sexuality, he began to fear being swamped by Fliess’s ideas. As long as the seduction theory lasted, Freud could see himself specializing in the psychological side of things, while Fliess specialized in the biological. But by rejecting the seduction theory in favor of infantile sexuality, Freud was moving deeper into Fliess’s biological territory—and the old division of labor was no longer tolerable. Accordingly, “his previous dependence upon Fliess gradually turned to rivalry, and he began to see their scientific work as potentially competing” (219). This bit of psychological reasoning is, of course, just as speculative as the orthodox notion of a transference relationship, and Sulloway’s presentation of it is, quite appropriately, conducted largely in hypothetical language. He gives a similarly speculative analysis of the so-called Weininger-Swoboda affair, a kind of coda to the Fliess relationship, in which Freud, as even Ernest Jones admits, dissembled about leaking Fliess’s ideas on bisexuality to one of his students. This too, according to Sulloway, reflected Freud’s sense of “growing ambivalence and intellectual rivalry” (231). Sulloway devotes such substantial space to these issues mainly because, in his view, they show Freud trying to cover up his biological tracks. They also provide Sulloway with an opportunity to vent his latent hostility to Freud. As in his earlier treatment of the break with Breuer, Sulloway contrasts a brutally ambitious Freud with an apparently tractable Fliess, who, to the end of his life, “preserved a considerable interest in psychoanalysis, reading the latest publications by Freud and referring suitable patients to Freud’s Berlin followers for psychoanalytic treatment” (233). Sulloway’s ostensible enthusiasm for Freud’s “creative” transformation of Fliess’s ideas gives way to a sustained indictment of Freud’s dishonesty, ingratitude, and “obsessional need for intellectual immortality” (217). It is another instance of the return of the repressed.

The Project, the Seduction Theory, and the Self-Analysis

Sulloway’s promotion of Wilhelm Fliess into a major player in Freud’s intellectual biography has a correspondingly profound effect on his interpretation of three landmarks in Freud’s odyssey during the 1890s: the Project for a Scientific Psychology, the decision to abandon the seduction theory, and, most important, Freud’s famous self-analysis, for which the Fliess correspondence has always been the main documentary source. Each of the episodes must now be adjusted to accommodate Fliess’s new preeminence and the central role that Sulloway would assign to evolutionary theory.

Ever since its publication in 1950, along with a selection of the Fliess correspondence, in Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse, Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology has proved controversial. It consists of two handwritten notebooks that Freud composed in late 1895 and sent to Fliess for examination and criticism. Freud never published the work, and he never asked Fliess to return the notebooks. The Project can accurately be described as Freud’s most extravagant attempt to ground psychology in neurology—a work of speculative physiological reductionism, portraying the mind, in James Strachey’s words, as “a piece of neurological machinery.”^[18] This point of view is vividly conveyed by its programmatic opening sentence. “The intention,” Freud writes, “is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction.”^[19] The “specifiable material particles” are the so-called neurones, and Freud seeks to explain all aspects of psychic life, from perception to dreaming, in terms of their interaction.

A number of scholars have argued about the cogency of Freud’s ideas in the Project and about their relation to his mature psychoanalytic theory of mind. Sulloway discusses these controversies at some length, taking, for the most part, a judicious middle-of-the-road position. But his real concern is to dispute the way Freud’s psychoanalytic biographers have interpreted the document. For the orthodox, the Project represents the dying gasp of Freud’s “need to neurologize” (121), “a last desperate effort,” in Ernest Jones’s words, “to cling to the safety of cerebral anatomy.”^[20] They therefore view Freud’s failure to publish it, or even to ask for its return, as a tacit recognition on his part that the attempt to understand the mind in reductive physiological terms—an ideal traceable to Freud’s days as a student under Brücke and redolent of nineteenth-century positivism—had to be abandoned. By virtue of its very excess, the Project marks for them the final watershed in Freud’s epoch-making movement from neurology to psychology. Now that Freud had finally unburdened himself of his most ambitious neurophysiological speculations, psychoanalysis was free to be born.

Sulloway disagrees. He insists that Freud abandoned the Project simply because he was unable to complete the third notebook, dealing with repression, and that this failing in no way implies a repudiation of the reductionist ideal embodied in the first two notebooks. But, in his own way, Sulloway, too, wants to view the abandonment of the Project as a watershed. For Sulloway, however, it marks not the end of Freud’s commitment to scientific reductionism but his conversion from one form of reductionism to another, namely, from neurophysiological reductionism to organic or evolutionary reductionism. “It is often assumed, erroneously, that there is only one form of reductionism in science—to the laws of physics and chemistry. But in certain sciences, particularly the life sciences, there are two major forms of reductionism—physical-chemical and historical-evolutionary” (131). Sulloway argues, accordingly, that the Project shows Freud coming to grief in his efforts to reduce mind to the laws of physics and chemistry, and turning instead to an equally reductive explanation in terms of the laws of evolution. In other words, the relative failure of the Project resulted in a shift not from neurophysiology to psychology but from neurophysiology to biology. It thus supports Sulloway’s general portrait of Freud as a biologist of the mind. “The Project,” Sulloway concludes, “contains the (at first) reluctant biogenetic seed of Freud’s later and far more enthusiastic endorsement of the developmental point of view in psychoanalysis” (131).

As with his interpretation of the Fliess correspondence, the construction Sulloway places on the Project for a Scientific Psychology depends on a distinctive reading of a handful of isolated sentences—even phrases—from the text. The Project is combed for any remark, no matter how brief, tentative, or hypothetical, that might be construed to support the notion of an evolutionary conversion. Thus, for example, Sulloway transforms what is a manifestly fleeting allusion to a possible “Darwinian line of thought” into a veritable biological epiphany.^[21] Not by the farthest, or most charitable, stretch of the imagination do these slender offerings justify the generalization that, “when necessary, Freud was able to renounce in the Project the concepts of a reductionist physiologist in favor of concepts proper to an organismic and evolutionary biologist”—“a conceptual step” whose importance “cannot be overestimated” (122). Admittedly, the Project is not finally a major building block in Sulloway’s interpretation of Freud as a crypto-biologist: his larger argument would scarcely be affected if his whole discussion of the work were excised. But Sulloway’s effort to force this reluctant document to fit his thesis is symptomatic of his intellectual manners throughout.

During the 1980s the seduction theory would become the most controversial issue in Freud’s biography, largely as a result of Jeffrey Masson’s book The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. In the light of this subsequent development, perhaps the first thing to be said about Sulloway’s treatment of the seduction theory is that it is in many respects consonant with the view taken by Freud himself and by his major psychoanalytic biographers. That is, for Sulloway the seduction theory was a mistake, and Freud judged correctly when he abandoned the idea. As we will see, Sulloway also accepts most of the usual reasons cited for this decision. But he seeks to give the episode a distinctive gloss, by which it is made to fit into his thesis of Freud’s increasing dependence on evolutionary biology, and in particular on Wilhelm Fliess. It would be no exaggeration to say that, for Sulloway, the seduction theory became superfluous precisely because of Fliess’s growing intellectual influence over Freud. The vicissitudes of the theory are thus subordinated to his book’s larger conceit.

In the traditional account of Freud’s intellectual development, the abandonment of the seduction theory and the emergence of the idea of infantile sexuality are intimately linked. When, for a variety of reasons, Freud reluctantly concluded that his patients’ stories about childhood seductions—the very experiences he took as the source of their neuroses—did not always prove to have real historical roots, he was forced to recognize that these neuroses were sometimes based on mere fantasies of seduction. But the notion of childhood sexual fantasy makes sense only if one assumes that children have an autonomous and spontaneous sexuality of their own. In other words, the discovery of the role of fantasy in the origins of neurosis caused Freud to abandon the notion of childhood sexual innocence (disturbed traumatically, according to the seduction hypothesis, by the sexual aggressions of adults) in favor of the notion of infantile sexuality.

Inasmuch as Sulloway accepts the general proposition that the idea of infantile sexuality displaced the seduction theory, his view corresponds to the received version of the episode. But he objects to seeing this displacement as a purely intrapsychic event in Freud’s mind, just as he objects to tying it to the self-analysis. Freud, Sulloway insists, was moving toward a notion of autonomous infantile sexuality before the collapse of the seduction theory, and he was doing so largely under Fliess’s influence. Thus, instead of saying that the theory’s collapse forced Freud to develop the idea of infantile sexuality, Sulloway prefers to suggest that it simply cleared the way for Freud to embrace an essentially Fliessian conception whose appeal he no longer had reason to resist. This entire line of reasoning depends on our accepting Sulloway’s earlier demonstration that Fliess was the source of Freud’s ideas about infantile sexuality—a demonstration that, as I’ve suggested, is far from conclusive. Nevertheless, the abandonment of the seduction theory is for Sulloway a salutary moment, in which Freud wisely discarded his “extreme environmentalism” (377) in favor of a firmly biological (and Fliessian) notion of indigenous childhood sexuality. Interestingly, Sulloway fails to notice that the abandonment of the seduction theory pushed Freud’s thinking in an even more radically psychological direction than had his earlier discovery that people can fall ill because of memories. Now, apparently, they could also fall ill because of fantasies, which are, so to speak, twice removed from reality. But to construe the episode in this fashion would undermine Sulloway’s aim of rescuing Freud from the grasp of “pure psychology.”

As one might expect, Sulloway is also eager to diminish the intellectual significance of Freud’s self-analysis. He complains that the self-analysis on which Freud embarked in 1897 “has tended to become an overburdened catchall for many developments in his thinking that have hitherto possessed no better historical explanation” (208). Sulloway objects to this emphasis on two grounds. First, it effectively makes Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis the result of a purely psychological episode, which in turn complements (indeed, determines) the equally unacceptable notion that psychoanalysis itself is an essentially psychological theory. Second, it implies that the discovery of psychoanalysis occurred in intellectual isolation: Freud’s thinking, it suggests, was so antithetical to the views of his contemporaries that the only way he could achieve his great breakthrough was by lonely self-scrutiny.

Sulloway rejects in particular the notion that the self-analysis played “a crucial role” (18n) in Freud’s discovery of infantile sexuality. His dismissal of this idea is not based on any examination of Freud’s very substantial account, in the Fliess correspondence, of the insights into childhood sexual life that the self-analysis in fact made possible. Indeed, it is not based on any immediate argument at all. Ultimately, it assumes once again that we are convinced, with Sulloway, that the real author of infantile sexuality was Fliess, who, aided by contemporary sexologists, made the idea available to Freud. Sulloway’s treatment of this issue stands in sharp antithesis to Didier Anzieu’s magisterial Freud’s Self-Analysis, a long, patient, and extraordinarily detailed reconstruction of the self-analysis, aimed at assessing its intellectual significance. Anzieu concludes that “the basic corpus of psychoanalytic notions,” including of course the theory of infantile sexuality, can be directly attributed to the self-analysis.^[22] Sulloway appears to have consulted only the original 1959 version of Anzieu’s book, not the much expanded two-volume edition of 1975. In any event, the empirical richness and logical rigor of Anzieu’s case for the self-analysis contrasts markedly with the thinness and sleight-of-hand of Sulloway’s counterargument regarding the preeminent role of Fliess. For Sulloway, naturally, Anzieu is just another apologist for the Freud legend.

Sulloway does not utterly dismiss the self-analysis. But his assessment of its “real scientific value” is revealing. Through self-analysis, Sulloway tell us, Freud was able

to confirm from his own experience just how remarkably widespread the opportunities were in every normal childhood for both traumatic and spontaneous sexual activity. At the same time, self-analysis enabled Freud to extend significantly his understanding of the various psychological correlates of such early sexual experience. He was able to recall feelings of jealousy and hatred at the birth of a younger male sibling, one year his junior (and who died after only eight months of life). He also recognized love for the mother and jealousy of the father in the early years of his childhood and therefore concluded that such feelings must be a universal concomitant of this period of life. (209)

Surely the most remarkable thing about this passage is its reduction of the Oedipus complex to a mere “psychological correlate”—almost an afterthought, whose discovery Sulloway gladly concedes to the self-analysis. The self-analysis, in other words, revealed only the psychological filigree, not the solid biological foundations, on which Freud’s claim to immortality must rest. At such moments, one recognizes that the two opposing views of the self-analysis reflect a more basic disagreement about what Freud actually accomplished when he created psychoanalysis. Behind the discrepancy lies what can best be described as Sulloway’s antipsychological prejudice. A psychological discovery, such as the Oedipus complex, is for him inevitably something lesser, something that can never aspire to the dignity of true scientific knowledge. For the same reason, Sulloway cannot allow that an act of pure psychological self-examination could result in a profound intellectual transformation. Freud will be great only if he can be made to resemble Darwin; it will not do to suggest that his achievement was more like that of Augustine or Rousseau.

Darwin and the Sexologists

Sulloway devotes an entire chapter of his book to Darwin’s influence on Freud. His treatment of Darwin is similar to his treatment of Fliess, although there are important differences as well. For one thing, Darwin is a figure of the first magnitude. Consequently, he doesn’t need the sort of intellectual rehabilitation that Sulloway graciously performs for Fliess. Similarly, the orthodox biographical tradition has always recognized Darwin as an important influence—Ernest Jones called Freud the “Darwin of the Mind”^[23]—in contrast to its efforts to minimize Fliess’s influence. Sulloway nevertheless complains that traditional Freud scholarship has paid only “formal lip service” (xiv) to Darwin and has failed to identify the precise nature of his impact on psychoanalysis.

Sulloway sets out to correct these errors. As he did with Fliess, he argues, first, that Darwin anticipated Freud on a number of issues—that Darwin was a proto-Freudian of sorts—and, second, that certain of Freud’s mature psychoanalytic ideas, when examined carefully, turn out to be much more Darwinian than has generally been recognized. In effect, Sulloway tries to bring Darwin and Freud—“two of the most important revolutionaries in the history of scientific thought” (xiv)—into closer intellectual proximity. Whether this tactic results in Freud’s subordination to Darwin or his unwarrantable elevation to the status of a scientist of equal genius is a question of perspective. But, for Sulloway, Freud is clearly Darwin’s most important intellectual heir.

Sulloway’s case for Darwin as a proto-Freudian consists largely in showing, at some length, that Darwin was interested in psychology. The claim that “Darwin undertook to explore a whole medley of later Freudian themes” (241) inspires a litany of supposedly Freudian topics, including dreams, mentioned by Darwin in his M and N notebooks of the 1830s. But Sulloway produces no evidence to justify the assertion that “much in these notebooks sounds remarkably like Freud himself” (242). Sulloway hopes to give Darwin’s psychological concerns a Freudian cast by stressing Darwin’s interest in the mental life of children. But the mental repertory of Darwin’s child is decidedly pre-analytic, indeed Victorian: anger, fear, pleasure, affection, reason, and moral sense. Even Sulloway is forced to admit that the ties between Darwin and Freud on this subject are for the most part distant.

Along with childhood emotions, the other putatively Freudian topic pursued by Darwin was sex. Here Sulloway has in mind Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, according to which the existence of physical traits with no clear value for survival can be explained in terms of their differential effect on reproduction. Thus the colorful but apparently useless ornamental plumage of male birds in fact helps them to attract females. Sulloway suggests that Darwin’s theory was responsible for the broad surge of intellectual interest in sex during the late nineteenth century, and, by implication, for Freud’s sexual ideas as well. But, of course, Darwin’s theory could just as easily reflect that interest; it is not necessarily its source. More important, the theory of sexual selection is in no way distinctively Freudian and plays no role in Freud’s sexual doctrines. In the end, Sulloway must content himself with the orotund judgment that Darwin provided a theoretical rationale for the time-honored dictum about love and hunger ruling the world. This, it seems, is the ultimate justification for Sulloway’s belief that Darwin “probably did more than any other individual to pave the way for Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic revolution” (238).

Sulloway’s more intriguing argument holds not that Darwin anticipated Freud but that Darwin’s ideas are deeply embedded in some of Freud’s most characteristic psychoanalytic concepts. Sulloway mentions several such concepts, including fixation and regression (which he ties to the evolutionary notion of developmental arrests). Once again, however, the centerpiece of his case is Freud’s theory of childhood psychosexual stages. Although Sulloway had earlier traced this theory to Fliess, he now proposes that Darwin was the more significant source of Freud’s inspiration. Actually, the link with Darwin is not direct, but by way of Ernst Haeckel’s famous hypothesis that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—that is, that an individual’s development from conception to adulthood repeats the evolutionary history of the race. “Freud’s implicit endorsement of this law,” Sulloway writes, “constitutes perhaps the least appreciated source of a priori biological influence in all of psychoanalytic theory” (259).

How, exactly, does the so-called fundamental biogenetic law figure in Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality? According to Sulloway, this recapitulatory hypothesis was the deep source of Freud’s surprising conviction that children’s oral and anal activities are in reality sexual. The takeoff point for Sulloway’s thesis is highly promising. He reminds us that Freud’s characterization of infantile sucking and defecating as sexual has always struck outsiders as so very improbable that they wonder how Freud could possibly have been as confident as he was of its accuracy:

Why are oral and anal zones such basic sources of infantile sexual excitation in Freudian theory? Granted that feeding at the mother’s breast constitutes a highly pleasurable experience for the hungry infant, how could Freud conceive of this activity as a form of sexual experience? Many non-Freudians have long been amazed by his nonchalant assurance about the answer to this debatable question. (258)

Sulloway responds that Freud’s confidence sprang precisely from his belief in the biogenetic law. Freud reasoned, says Sulloway, that “if the developing child recapitulates the history of the race, it must likewise recapitulate the sexual history of the race,” which meant that the child experiences “all the archaic forms of sexual pleasure that once characterized the mature life stages of our remote ancestors” (259). The most important among such archaic sources of sexual pleasure are the mouth and the anus.

Sulloway cites three passages as evidence that Freud drew on phylogenetic considerations to support his conception of oral and anal stages. Unfortunately, the passages do not in fact prove that the phylogenetic argument was the real source of Freud’s conviction. On the contrary, Freud’s language points to an altogether different conclusion, to wit, that the phylogenetic argument was for him something of an afterthought, a welcome crutch perhaps, but hardly the clinching evidence or the true basis for his persuasion.

One of these passages comes from a section added to the 1915 edition of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality—the most systematic and detailed exposition of his ideas about sexual life, and so presumably the place where Freud could be expected to present the strongest case for his particular conception of infantile sexuality. It reads as follows: “We shall give the name of ‘pregenital’ to the organizations of sexual life in which the genital zones have not yet taken over their predominant part. We have hitherto identified two such organizations [the oral and the anal], which almost seem as though they were harking back to early animal forms of life.”^[24] This is a curiously laconic and offhand way to draw attention to what, in Sulloway’s estimation, afforded the all-important inspiration for Freud’s most controversial claim. The reticence of the passage stands in marked contrast to the vigor and expansiveness of the clinical argument for infantile sexuality that Freud mounts in his text. The Three Essays conveys the unmistakable impression that the real source of his conviction was not, as Sulloway would have it, the elusive biogenetic law but the observable (contemporary) fact that the mouth and anus persist as organs of sexual gratification among adults, particularly in kissing and anal intercourse. Freud asks, in effect, why these activities play such a significant role in the sexual lives of grown-ups, when they are not essential to intercourse and thus to reproduction. His answer is that the mouth and anus can readily be reinstated as organs of sexual gratification because they have already been such in infancy. Sulloway ignores this line of reasoning, powerfully advanced in the pages of the Three Essays, because it renders his hypothesis about a phylogenetic source of Freud’s conviction largely superfluous. And if we were inclined to think that Freud has perhaps chosen to suppress the real evolutionary rationale for his belief and to present his clinical argument merely as a camouflage, then one must wonder why he allowed himself even the passing allusion to “early animal forms of life” cited by Sulloway. It makes him a rather poor dissembler.

Ironically, Sulloway’s insistence on phylogenetic rather than clinical reasoning causes him to overlook what is probably Freud’s most important intellectual debt to Darwin. The truly Darwinian feature of his argument about infantile sexuality in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is not its content but its form. It is largely an inferential argument, whose most obvious model is Darwin’s argument for natural selection in The Origin of Species. There Darwin concedes that he has no direct empirical evidence of natural selection, only the implicit evidence of fossil remains and the like. But these, Darwin holds, make it legitimate for him to infer the action of natural selection in order to account for their existence. Freud’s argument for infantile sexuality is structurally identical: he cannot directly demonstrate that the child’s oral and anal activities are sexual (as opposed to simply pleasurable), but the inference is nonetheless justified because it explains certain things that we can observe, in particular, such adult sexual practices as kissing and anal intercourse. Darwin’s primary significance for Freud, in short, was conceptual, not substantive.

Given his interest in portraying Freud as an evolutionary thinker, Sulloway is noticeably quiet about Freud’s Lamarckism, which he disposes of in two brief paragraphs. Partly, no doubt, this is because the orthodox biographical tradition has always stressed, indeed lamented, Freud’s partiality to Lamarck. A deeper reason, I suspect, is that to underline Freud’s Lamarckism would detract from the Darwinian connection Sulloway is laboring to establish. But the specifically Darwinian contribution to evolutionary theory, natural selection, plays no role in psychoanalysis. Instead, Freud draws repeatedly on the Lamarckian doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics—for example, to explain how the memory of the primal crime has been passed down from generation to generation—a doctrine whose importance Darwin in fact sought to diminish by the theory of natural selection.

If we are forced to conclude that Sulloway’s case for Freud as a Darwinian is no more persuasive than his case for Freud as a Fliessian, we should not overlook a useful corrective implicit in his argument. Perhaps the greatest virtue of Sulloway’s largely wrongheaded book is to remind us that Freud’s strongest allegiance was to science, indeed to science precisely on the model of Darwin. We are in danger of forgetting this profound truth about Freud’s intellectual identity because over the past two decades we have grown accustomed to the portrait of Freud as a hermeneutician and philosopher—a figure on the model not of Darwin but of Nietzsche. Paul Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy (1970) is the locus classicus of this portrait, which has dominated the largely literary and philosophical representations of Freud in recent scholarship. There is much truth in the hermeneutic Freud, and it is a truth that Sulloway ignores. But he also has the advantage of his myopia. Exactly because his account of Freud is so supremely unfashionable—so innocent of current literary prejudices—it forces us to recall that part of Freud has always strenuously resisted the effort to transform him into a philosopher of language. Lionel Trilling, himself a literary critic, drew attention to this recalcitrance over thirty years ago in Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture. Thus, while Sulloway may not convince us that psychoanalysis is a form of Darwinism, he does help us to remember that Freud thought of himself above all as a scientist.

The chapter on Darwin is followed by one on sexology. Sulloway’s desire to group Freud among the late-nineteenth-century sexologists reflects his more general object of undermining Freud’s claim to originality and the associated image of his intellectual isolation. Yet it also reflects Sulloway’s genuine enthusiasm for psychoanalysis’s emphasis on sex. He may be indifferent to the unconscious, but he has nothing but admiration for Freud’s supposed pansexualism. Sex, after all, is for Sulloway the biological hook in Freud: if anything, Sulloway wants to make even more of it than do the traditional biographers.

Sulloway’s enchantment with turn-of-the-century sexology leads him to compose a little narrative of its development, and for many pages Freud disappears from view. The general point he wants to make is that almost every element of Freud’s sexual theory can be found in the writings of these contemporaries, the majority of whom published their ideas before the appearance of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905. Sulloway emphasizes, in particular, that the sexologists anticipated Freud’s thinking about the perversions and, even more important, about the sexuality of children and infants. In the latter instance, Sulloway follows in the footsteps of Stephen Kern, who argued, in 1973, that “almost every element of Freud’s theory of child sexuality was exactly anticipated, or in some way implied or suggested, before him.”^[25] Sulloway hardly seems to notice that, by promoting the influence of Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Albert Moll on Freud’s ideas about infantile sexuality, he effectively undermines his earlier case for Fliess as the source of those ideas.

The charge that Freud’s sexual ideas were unoriginal, and that he has received undue credit for an intellectual revolution whose real authors have fallen victim to historical amnesia, is not without merit. But it betrays a certain naïveté about the issue of originality. As Sulloway notes, Freud made no secret of his borrowings from other authors. He begins the first of his Three Essays, “The Sexual Aberrations,” by acknowledging his intellectual debts, and the text is generously footnoted throughout. But there is a more fundamental, and subtle, consideration: the elements of a theory never add up to the theory itself. In judging a theory’s originality one must do more than compile a list of those components that can be traced to earlier sources. One must also assess the structural power of the conceptual whole into which the components have been fitted. In this respect, Freud’s achievement can be usefully compared to the intellectual syntheses created by Marx or Darwin. Numerous scholars have shown that all the components of Darwin’s theory of natural selection and of Marx’s theory of historical materialism had been anticipated by earlier thinkers. But Marx and Darwin have been rightly judged great innovators because they were the first to shape those ideas into a rigorous and comprehensive analytic structure. Anyone who has spent much time reading the sexual writings of even the best of Freud’s contemporaries, such as Havelock Ellis, will have no difficulty in recognizing that Freud achieved the same sort of quantum leap in the Three Essays. The conceptual power and inclusiveness of Freud’s volume set it categorically apart. Sulloway’s complaint that Freud’s name has “become associated with many important ideas about human sexuality that he did not originate” (277) thus misses the point. No practiced student of the history of ideas expects intellectual revolutions to occur in a vacuum. On the contrary, as Thomas Kuhn has shown, they are always richly prepared.

By placing his discussion of the sexologists right after his chapter on Darwin, Sulloway presumably aims to suggest that their influence on Freud be viewed as a kind of extension of Darwin’s own influence. In this fashion, Sulloway hopes to enlist them as accomplices in his broader enterprise of promoting the importance of evolutionary theory in the emergence of psychoanalysis. “It was largely through the sexologists,” he asserts, “that Freud was prompted to substitute an evolutionary and phylogenetic conception of psychosexuality for the physiochemical one with which he and Josef Breuer began their pioneering studies of the neuroses” (xiv). But Sulloway is no more successful with the sexologists than he was with Fliess (or with Freud himself, for that matter) in demonstrating that turn-of-the-century sexology represented “a major conceptual offshoot of the Darwinian Revolution” (318). Like virtually all scientists of their day, these men were indeed students of evolution, and their writings hence contain a smattering of phylogenetic ruminations, which Sulloway does his best to highlight. But the firm impression remains that their views were shaped above all by clinical considerations, especially case histories. Evolutionary theory, in other words, does not seem integral to the sexual ideas they embraced, and Sulloway’s effort to transform the sexologists into Darwinian acolytes is ultimately an exercise in wishful thinking. Thus the sexologists—the last of the “significant others” to whom the bulk of his book is devoted—do very little to advance his evolutionary case.

Dreams

The period from 1899 to 1905 was undoubtedly the most fecund in Freud’s career. During these years his essential psychoanalytic ideas first saw the light of print. Together, the five major writings of the period constitute the intellectual centerpiece of the revolution associated with his name: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), considered by virtually all (including Freud himself) his most important book; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), with its theory of “Freudian” slips; his study of the psychology of humor, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905); the first of the great case histories, “Dora” (written in 1901, published in 1905); and the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Sulloway does not dissent from the consensus about the significance of these writings. On the contrary, he is lavish in his praise: “These five works constitute a magnificent achievement, which certainly places Freud among the most creative scientific minds of all time” (358). Yet in Sulloway’s intellectual biography of Freud, they receive less than half the attention devoted to Wilhelm Fliess. Too famous to be ignored, but unreceptive to Sulloway’s evolutionary thesis, the five seminal texts shrink in stature and come to occupy a kind of conceptual limbo. Even Sulloway’s praise sounds hollow.

Sulloway directs most of his attention to the theory of dreams. In many respects his treatment of the theory is unexceptionable. He has no objection to Freud’s interpretations of individual dreams; he admires Freud’s courage in revealing so much of himself in his book; and he judges its conception of dreams as wish fulfillments not only correct but profound. “Freud’s mature theory of dreaming is virtually unparalleled, even today, for the remarkable insight that it brought to bear upon the psychological mechanisms of dreaming” (334). The book, he says, belongs among the “great classics in science” (346). Clearly, Sulloway is far removed from Frederick Crews, for whom The Interpretation of Dreams is just so much pretentious nonsense.

On the whole, then, Sulloway’s discussion of the dream theory is entirely familiar, indeed dutiful. Sensing perhaps that his revisionist stance requires that he say something provocative about the book, he advances the proposition that it is among the “least understood” (320) of Freud’s writings. Yet Sulloway is extraordinarily reticent about specifying exactly how it has been misunderstood. The “foremost” (347) misunderstanding, we learn, has to do not with the book’s argument but with its initial reception. Here Sulloway takes issue with the traditional psychoanalytic account, according to which Freud’s masterpiece met with “icy silence” and “annihilating criticism” (347). Sulloway sees this characterization as part of the broader strategy to represent Freud as a lonely genius, and he makes a plausible case that the response to the book was, while not enthusiastic, at least respectful, and certainly more generous than Freud allowed. Freud, it seems, was no different from any other author in finding that his reviewers left much to be desired. (One suspects that, given the hostile reception of his own book, Sulloway would now look more sympathetically on Freud’s complaints.) But even if Sulloway is correct about the book’s reception, this hardly justifies his description of The Interpretation of Dreams as Freud’s most misunderstood work. Sulloway seems right on the verge of revealing some explosive secret about the book, but none is forthcoming.

Wherein, then, lies the misunderstanding? As he did with the idea of infantile sexuality, Sulloway notes that Freud’s theory of dreams “had been anticipated piecemeal in almost every major constituent by prior students of the problem” (322). But he does not try to get much mileage out of this charge, mainly because Freud devotes the first chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams to a long and full discussion of his important predecessors. Gradually, however, it becomes apparent that Sulloway wants to disturb our comfortable certainties about the dream theory primarily in order to insinuate his evolutionary thesis concerning Freud’s hidden biological agenda. Needless to say, the unrelentingly psychological texture of the book makes this a decidedly uphill interpretive battle.

Sulloway contends that Freud actually had two theories of dreams. The first is contained in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, and, not surprisingly, it turns out to be fundamentally mechanistic. Dreams, according to the Project, “are simply hallucinations motivated by the small residues of energy that are ordinarily left over in an otherwise sleeping (or energyless) mind” (327). But just as the physiological reductionism of the Project was superseded, in Sulloway’s view, by the biological reductionism of mature psychoanalytic theory, so the Project’s mechanistic dream theory gave way, in The Interpretation of Dreams, to a theory Sulloway repeatedly characterizes as “genetic” (329) or “dynamic-genetic” (328). In Sulloway’s mind, these catchwords obviously conjure up the full panoply of evolutionary speculation that, for him, constitutes the secret rationality of Freud’s thought. But one nevertheless wants to know just what in Freud’s conception of dreams as wish fulfillments might reasonably be termed “genetic,” and hence evolutionary. The theory, after all, seems to be fashioned of the purest psychological stuff.

The answer to this mystery—and the ultimate rationale for Sulloway’s evolutionary insinuations—lies in Freud’s contention that every dream represents a wish from childhood:

In contrast [to the theory of the Project], Freud’s later (1900) conception of dream distortion was based upon a dynamic-genetic model of human psychosexual development. With the discovery of the id, the primary reason for dreaming became genetic rather than economic: that is, we dream because the infantile id clamors for nightly self-expression, rather than because impinging energy residues or unresolved daytime conflicts happen to discharge themselves in the sleeping mind. (328–29)

In effect, Freud’s insistence on the childhood origin of dream wishes permits Sulloway to link the dream theory to the notion of infantile psychosexual stages. In his peculiar reading, the psychosexual stages mean the Fliessian confection of phylogenetic ideas to whose elucidation he devoted such solicitude earlier in his book. Sulloway doesn’t spell out this connection explicitly, probably because it is so hopelessly strained, but he does cite a passage from a letter to Fliess in which Freud remarks that “biologically dream-life seems to me to proceed directly from the residue of the prehistoric stage of life (one to three years).”^[26] Sulloway also asserts that, in the Dora case history, “the theory of dreams blends inextricably into the theory of sexuality and hence into the biological substratum of Freud’s thinking” (346). Even when any explicit invocation of Fliess is suppressed, one senses him hovering in the wings. The failure to recognize the dream theory’s deep evolutionary logic, one concludes, is the ultimate source of Sulloway’s brooding allusions to its having been so greatly misunderstood.

The Primal Crime and the Death Instinct

One would not expect a book championing Freud’s claim to scientific rigor to have much use for Totem and Taboo (1912–13) or Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), two of his most fanciful works, which propound, respectively, the theory of the primal crime and the notion of the death instinct. Even the psychoanalytic establishment has tended to wash its hands of these writings, fearing that they bring disrepute on an intellectual enterprise that pretends to be empirical. But once he has disposed of the greatly misunderstood Interpretation of Dreams (and given the other major writings of the 1900–05 period even shorter shrift), Sulloway devotes much of the remainder of his intellectual biography to an elucidation of precisely these two works.

In Sulloway’s view, Freud’s intellectual development from 1905 until his death in 1939 underwent a gradual “rebiologization.” Sulloway grants that the writings from 1900 to 1905 are heavily weighted toward psychology, but thereafter, he insists, Freud reverted to the evolutionary preoccupations of the period of his tutelage under Fliess in the 1890s. “Freud’s psychoanalytic theories became more biological, not less so, after the crucial years of discovery” (391).

In order to sustain this view, Sulloway subjects Freud’s work during the final thirty-four years of his life to a radically selective reading. His first move is to place the cultural works, particularly Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents, at the very center of Freud’s concerns. Thus the great bulk of his post-1905 writings—the case histories, the metapsychological treatises (except for Beyond the Pleasure Principle), the several volumes of expository writings, the essays of applied psychoanalysis—are largely ignored. Sulloway turns to them only when he can extract the occasional sentence or phrase that might lend support to his evolutionary construction. Likewise, within the cultural works, he limits his attention to those passages in which Freud enters upon phylogenetic speculations. Totem and Taboo, with its theory of the primal crime, is thus his favorite text, and the other cultural writings catch his eye mainly when they, too, turn to phylogenetic themes. Within the phylogenetic material itself, Sulloway labors heroically to draw attention to one idea in particular, namely, the hypothesis of “olfactory repression,” according to which the link between sexuality and the sense of smell was suppressed when mankind adopted upright posture. Virtually the whole of Freud’s mature psychoanalytic thought is made to emanate from this single proposition. In effect, Wilhelm Fliess’s infamous “naso-genital” hypothesis resurrects itself as the secret heart of the en tire psychoanalytic apparatus. Small wonder that anti-Freudians should find Sulloway’s book so congenial.

This brutal reordering of Freud’s intellectual priorities demands not only that the vast bulk of what he wrote be neglected but also that the phylogenetic speculations themselves be subjected to major distortion. The primal crime is a case in point. In Totem and Taboo Freud advances this “just-so” story in order to explain the origins of morality and religion. The crucial moment in his phylogenetic tale occurs when the brothers, having dispatched their father, suddenly decide to forgo intercourse with their newly liberated mother and sisters. They raise their act of renunciation into a principle, the first moral law (the incest taboo), and they transform the murdered father into a god, thereby establishing religion as well. Freud seeks to explain this extraordinary decision, which marks the birth of civilization, in terms of two considerations, one practical, the other psychological. In practical terms, the incest taboo was necessary to prevent civil war from breaking out among the brothers over the spoils of victory. But more important than this Hobbesian motive was the sons’ discovery of their Oedipal ambivalence. After their bloody deed, they recalled that they had also loved their father. The institution of the incest taboo, and, later, of the totem religion with its father god, represented an act of remorse, an attempt by the sons to appease their overwhelming sense of guilt.

When Sulloway recounts the story of the primal crime, however, he effectively strips it of its Oedipal logic. He stresses the brothers’ pragmatic wish to avert the outbreak of fraternal strife and drastically mutes the distinctively psychological motif in Freud’s hypothesis: the notion that civilization originated in a dramatic acting out of the Oedipal emotions of resentment and guilt. This erasure serves Sulloway’s purposes in two ways. First, insofar as it “depsychologizes” the primal crime, it contributes to the general demotion of psychology in Sulloway’s reading of Freud. In this sense, it is of a piece with Sulloway’s reduction of the Oedipus complex itself to a mere “psychological correlate” of Freud’s deeper biological concerns. At the same time, it also obscures the link between Freud’s phylogenetic hypothesis and his theory of individual psychological development. For Freud, the primal crime acquires a profound emotional resonance because that same crime is rehearsed in the life of every child as it passes through the psychological vortex of the Oedipus crisis. To be sure, Freud believed that every child is born into the world with a memory of the primal crime as part of the mind’s “archaic heritage.” But that heritage can exercise its power only because it is revitalized in the concrete family experience of the individual. By ignoring the Oedipal dimension of Freud’s argument, Sulloway makes the theory of the primal crime more purely phylogenetic, more committed to a disembodied notion of prehistorical “organic repression,” than is in fact the case. Freud’s richly nuanced interweaving of historical speculation and clinical observation unravels.

Sulloway must regret that nowhere in Totem and Taboo—the most extensive of the phylogenetic writings—does Freud remember to mention the nose and the repression of the sense of smell. Once again, an idea we are asked to consider absolutely central to Freud’s thought fails to put in an appearance just where we would most expect to find it. On the few occasions that Freud does mention the repressed sense of smell in his writings, he takes great care to subordinate the idea to other matters, always presenting it in a suitably tentative and hypothetical fashion. In Civilization and Its Discontents the subordination is literal: the idea is consigned to two footnotes (where it occupies a position comparable to the notorious footnote in which Freud attributes the conquest of fire to the repression of the competitive homosexual practice of extinguishing fires by urinating on them). Sulloway ignores the obvious implications of this literary gesture. Quite arbitrarily, he promotes the idea from its marginal place in Freud’s text (and presumably in his thought) to the status of a central and fundamental concept. Likewise, where Freud’s language is hedged and subjunctive, Sulloway’s is emphatic and indicative. The evidence of the texts themselves suggests that the phylogenetic hypothesis of upright posture and olfactory repression served Freud as a kind of safety valve or fallback, resorted to when better (namely, clinical) arguments seemed in need of help. Such is its role, for example, in the Rat Man case: having noted that his patient was a renifleur, who as a child could recognize people by their smell, Freud observes that an inclination to take pleasure in smell “may play a part in the genesis of neurosis.” He then seeks to support his hunch with a brief phylogenetic excursus:

And here I should like to raise the general question whether the atrophy of the sense of smell (which is an inevitable result of man’s assumption of an erect posture) and the consequent organic repression of his pleasure in smell may not have had a considerable share in the origin of his susceptibility to nervous disease.^[27]

Phylogeny, in effect, is the argument of last resort—not, as Sulloway would have it, of first preference. As Freud wrote in the Wolf Man case: “I regard it as a methodological error to seize on a phylogenetic explanation before the ontogenetic possibilities have been exhausted.”^[28] No doubt Freud believed in his speculations. But they remain, nonetheless, residues of his nineteenth-century scientific education, relegated to the digressive margins in his new psychological science. Even if we were to accept Sulloway’s argument that phylogenetic ideas such as the repressed sense of smell were dearer to Freud than his textual subordination of them implies, we must ask whether Freud’s claim to greatness could possibly rest on such speculations. Much as Sulloway may revel in them, they are simply not the ideas that transformed intellectual history—that created the modern sense of self and made us all, in effect, Freudians. It is thus dubious praise when Sulloway celebrates Freud’s phylogenetic musings—the intellectual counterpart, one might say, of his private collection of archaeological artifacts—as “one of the most sophisticated psychobiological conceptions of mind yet proposed” (392). For, in truth, if Sulloway is right, Freud’s intellectual achievement is no more worthy of admiration than Fliess’s. Only someone deeply hostile to Freud could urge us to embrace such a trivialization of his thought.

Sulloway is the first writer since Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown—two very unlikely bedfellows—to put in a good word for the death instinct. (Interestingly, Marcuse and Brown were also devotees of the primal crime.) Sulloway not only praises the idea of the death instinct but makes its formulation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle the subject of the final chapter in his intellectual biography. His enthusiasm is not as surprising as one might think. The death instinct is in some ways rather like Fliess: it has proven to be an embarrassment to Freud’s orthodox biographers, who have reacted by invoking Freud’s personal psychology. Much as they prefer to view Freud’s fascination with Fliess as an instance of transference, these biographers have sought to explain away the notion of the death instinct in terms of Freud’s personal preoccupation with death (about which he had been obsessing since the 1890s) or his equally personal responses to the destructiveness of the Great War, in which three of his sons fought, and to the death of his daughter Sophie from influenza in January 1920. Almost on principle, Sulloway objects to such psychologizing. “One must not forget,” he writes, “how extremely logical Freud was in his thinking” (395). Sulloway thus tries to show that Freud’s embrace of the death instinct, like the friendship with Fliess, was utterly rational, and that it provided the conceptual basis for virtually all the important changes in his thought after 1920.

When Sulloway insists that the death instinct “has a perfectly rational logic” (395), he does not mean that it is supported by clear empirical evidence from which the assumption of a fundamental urge toward self-destruction—or, as Freud preferred to say, toward restoring an earlier state of things—follows according to a rigorous sequence of inferences. Rather, he means that the idea served to resolve a number of inconsistencies—pertaining especially to narcissism, regression, and fixation to traumas—that had developed in Freud’s theoretical views during the years from 1910 to 1920. Sulloway’s exposition both of those inconsistencies and of their supposed resolution by the new instinctual hypothesis is even more tortuous than Freud’s own exposition in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which is arguably the most obscure piece of writing he ever produced. The contention that the death instinct emerged as a solution to certain theoretical difficulties is plausible enough; indeed, it is an explanation offered by the orthodox biographers as well. Whether such an apology is sufficient excuse to call the theory “rational” is another matter.

The real source of Sulloway’s enthusiasm for the death instinct is not, of course, that it is rational but that it is biological—for which he seems prepared to forgive any amount of ungrounded speculation. The death instinct may be, as he says, a biological “romance” (393), but he is willing to put up with the romance for the sake of the biology, since it lends weight to his proposition that Freud’s mature thought underwent a process of “rebiologization.” Undeniably the death instinct is biological, although it is scarcely evolutionary. Sulloway frankly concedes that it has nothing to do with Darwin, indeed that it is anti-Darwinian, because an innate urge to die would hardly give an organism a competitive advantage in the struggle for existence. But neither does Sulloway offer any reason for considering the idea evolutionary in a more general sense. The sort of phylogenetic logic that informs both the theory of the primal crime and the random observations about upright posture and the repression of the sense of smell is nowhere to be found in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, whose speculative reasoning works at a much higher level of abstraction.

Finally, Sulloway’s effort to explain most of the important changes in Freud’s thought after 1920 in terms of the death instinct is unusually feeble. In particular, his argument that such major transformations as the new structural theory of the mind and the revised theory of anxiety derive from the death instinct is cryptic and unpersuasive. No more than the idea of “olfactory repression” will the death instinct support so massive an intellectual burden. There is something attractively quixotic in Sulloway’s readiness to go to bat for this much maligned concept, and he is correct to remind us of Freud’s biological loyalties. But as a master explanatory hypothesis for the evolution of Freud’s thought after 1920 it is woefully inadequate. Freud always insisted on the provisional nature of his notion of life and death instincts, stressing that he was not even convinced of the conception himself, and its traces in his subsequent thinking are much fainter than Sulloway thinks.

Psychoanalytic Politics

Ultimately, Sulloway is obliged to explain why the biological essence of Freud’s thought has remained hidden. In my view, of course, the question is entirely gratuitous, because the secret biological rationale Sulloway pretends to find doesn’t exist—either that, or it is such a paltry affair that its invisibility hardly needs explaining. But, logically, Sulloway must account for its apparent repression, and the final section of his book is devoted to this undertaking.

His principal explanation is very simple: the portrayal of Freud as a pure psychologist, working in lonely isolation, served the institutional needs of the psychoanalytic movement by providing it with the militant self-image it required to defeat its opponents. But alongside this central motive, Sulloway identifies two lesser political advantages that supposedly accrued from the systematic denial of Freud’s debt to biology. First, it helped in characterizing psychoanalysis as an empirical, as opposed to a theoretical, doctrine. Undeniably Freud stressed the experiential basis of his ideas. But why would psychoanalysis have been made to seem unempirical or unscientific by admitting its reliance on biology? After all, if Freud had announced himself as heir to Darwin, he could have appealed to the most pervasive scientific prejudice of his age. If, however, his strategy was to avoid any appearance of indebtedness to theory, one is hard put to explain why he was not more consistently circumspect. Especially imprudent from this perspective was his decision to go public with the primal crime, the death instinct, and Sulloway’s beloved hypothesis about the nose and upright posture, all of which trumpet Freud’s weakness for speculation. I have no wish to dispute the importance of theory in Freud’s intellectual achievement, but in insisting so vehemently on its primacy, Sulloway underestimates the role of empirical influences on Freud’s thought, above all the evidence gathered from his clinical practice carried on over so many years. To be sure, Freud’s ideas were not derived from this clinical material without the assistance of various assumptions and deductions. But neither does the clinical material count for nothing, as one would gather from reading Sulloway.

The second ancillary political motive for denying Freud’s debt to biology, according to Sulloway, was the need to combat various psychoanalytic renegades, notably Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. He argues that Adler and Jung were expelled from the ranks because of their excessive biologizing. Because biology was the ultimate source of the defectors’ errors, the argument runs, orthodox Freudians (starting with Freud himself) grew ever more set on exorcising it from psychoanalysis. This hypothesis ignores the fact that the real source of disagreement between Freud and both Adler and Jung was not biology but sex: Adler sought to demote the importance of sex by emphasizing aggression; Jung sought to demote it by emphasizing spirituality. Even more significant, while Adler might be construed as a biological deviationist (though Freud objected most to the superficiality of his psychological ideas), Freud’s own views were consistently more biological, not less so, than Jung’s. Jung was a rampant psychologizer, ever ready to interpret a biological urge in terms of its deeper “symbolic” meaning. Freud, by contrast, insisted on the claims of the body and refused the easy popularity Jung won for himself with his “sex-isn’t-everything” propaganda. Freud in fact abhorred Jung’s mystical dematerialization of the libido theory, and he wrote Totem and Taboo, his most biological book in Sulloway’s opinion, precisely in response to Jung’s dabblings in mythology and comparative religion. Far from constituting a reversion to biology, Jung’s views, to Freud, represented “a new religio-ethical system.” “The truth is,” he continued, speaking now of both Jung and Adler, “these people have picked out a few cultural overtones from the symphony of life and have once more failed to hear the mighty and primordial melody of the instincts.”^[29] Thus to attribute the repression of biology to Freud’s squabbles with Jung and Adler entails a peculiarly convoluted piece of reasoning.

But in Sulloway’s view, Freud’s wish to distance himself from Jung, like the question of his empirical credentials, was a less potent reason for the repression of biology than his need to fabricate an image of himself as a heroic innovator engaged in a lonely struggle against the prevailing ideas of his time. To establish that this self-image was in fact mythical, Sulloway proceeds to rehearse the evidence for Freud’s isolation and originality, and once again he finds it wanting. Certain of Freud’s autobiographical pronouncements provide Sulloway with targets as broad as a barn. In the Autobiographical Study of 1925, for example, Freud complains: “For more than ten years after my separation from Breuer I had no followers. I was completely isolated. In Vienna I was shunned, abroad no notice was taken of me. My Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, was scarcely reviewed in the technical journals.”^[30] Drawing on the work of previous scholars, notably Henri Ellenberger and Hannah Decker, Sulloway easily shows that the reception of Freud’s work was less hostile than this blanket characterization implies. But where Sulloway finds praise balanced by legitimate reservations in the reviews, Freud could see only grudging acknowledgment amidst an avalanche of criticism and a thoroughgoing refusal to recognize the significance of his discoveries. Isolation, it seems, is in the mind of the beholder. If the scientific world failed to line up in a unified reactionary chorus to condemn Freud’s work, that hardly proves that he didn’t feel profoundly alone and embattled. To suggest, as Sulloway does, that Freud’s complaints of isolation and rejection were a calculated deception—a conspiracy abetted by his biographers—intended to conceal his intellectual debts, especially his biological ones, bespeaks a remarkably ham-fisted conception of human psychology. The Fliess correspondence, with its constant refrain of bitter loneliness from which his interlocutor’s friendship provided the only relief, testifies to the depth of Freud’s sense of alienation. He may have overestimated the indifference or opposition of his contemporaries, but the notion that he was engaged in a willful misrepresentation of the facts in order to hide his dark biological secret not only contradicts all the existing evidence about his state of mind but imputes to him a degree of cunning that is scarcely credible.

In much the same way, Sulloway repeatedly disputes Freud’s pretensions to originality—the second historical distortion, after his isolation, on which his heroic self-image was supposedly constructed. I’ve already suggested that Sulloway’s treatment of this issue is unsophisticated. In his final chapter he turns to Freud’s express preoccupation with questions of priority, especially regarding the discovery of infantile sexuality. Following Robert Merton and Paul Roazen, who drew attention some time ago to Freud’s prickliness in this respect, Sulloway has little trouble disproving Ernest Jones’s contention that “Freud was never interested in questions of priority.”^[31] But Freud’s concern with such questions need not be construed as evidence of a propensity for heroic self-mythologizing. If anything, it was a normal aspect of scientific etiquette, in Freud’s day no less than ours. Scientists are routinely given to priority disputes, because reputations so often depend on who proposed an idea first. But Sulloway insists on a more Machiavellian explanation. “For Freud and his movement, scientific priority was revolutionary propaganda” (476). Claims to priority contributed to the Freudian myth of heroic originality, whose defense in turn inspired the need to repress the master’s debt to biology. Such claims are thereby implicated in the larger biographical conspiracy that Sulloway aims to expose.

Exaggerated isolation and overstated claims to originality, then, do not necessarily support Sulloway’s portrait of Freud as a self-appointed hero. But Sulloway has no real need of them. Plenty of evidence exists to show that Freud did indeed entertain a heroic conception of his intellectual mission. Nor has anyone ever denied this. Not only is it prominently displayed in all the psychoanalytic biographies, above all in Jones, but Freud’s own remarks in this regard are unequivocal. Most striking is a famous letter to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, in April 1885, announcing that he had destroyed his papers and correspondence:

I have just carried out a resolution which one group of people, as yet unborn and fated to misfortune, will feel acutely. Since you can’t guess whom I mean I will tell you: they are my biographers. I have destroyed all my diaries of the past fourteen years, with letters, scientific notes and the manuscripts of my publications.…Let the biographers chafe; we won’t make it too easy for them. Let each one of them believe he is right in his “Conception of the Development of the Hero”: even now I enjoy the thought of how they will all go astray.^[32]

It is a statement of peerless self-confidence, if not outright arrogance. Even more stunning than the allusion to “the Development of the Hero” is Freud’s certainty, while still less than thirty, that he would have not just one biographer but many. In the same heroic vein is the equally revealing observation, also in a letter to Martha, that “I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history.”^[33] Freud’s heroic self-image expressed itself, over the course of his life, through a series of identifications, first with generals and politicians like Hannibal, Cromwell, and Napoleon, then with scientists and intellectuals like Goethe and Darwin, and finally—and most profoundly—with the revolutionary religious figure of Moses. As he told Fliess in 1900, “I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer, if you want it translated—with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.”^[34]

By all evidence, then, Freud’s heroic self-conception was both pronounced and enduring. Curiously, Sulloway’s thesis forces him to imagine, on the contrary, that it was surprisingly fragile, indeed so fragile that it would have come unstuck had Freud or his biographers failed to conceal his intellectual debt to biology. To admit any common conceptual ground with Fliess, the sexologists, or even Darwin would, in this view, have reduced Freud to a mere intellectual journeyman. “To Freud,” Sulloway writes, “the denial of history was a prerequisite part of being and, above all, of remaining a full-fledged hero in the eyes of posterity. By destroying his past, he actively sought to cultivate the ‘unknowable’ about himself and thereby to set himself apart from the more transparent nonheroes of humanity” (479). Even if one grants, for the sake of argument, that his debt to biology was as substantial as Sulloway says, his sense of heroic destiny was surely robust enough to withstand exposure of any hidden biological rationale lurking behind his thought. In fact, I rather imagine that he would have welcomed it as further evidence of his greatness.

Sulloway accuses the psychoanalytic biographers of perpetuating and refining Freud’s own mythical representation of his intellectual odyssey, seeking to expunge even those remnants of his biological heritage that Freud was so imprudent as to reveal. To maintain this view, Sulloway must deny that the biographers were in any way motivated by a desire to understand the evolution of Freud’s thought correctly. Rather, they were at all times guided by a single-minded consciousness of the political advantages of presenting Freud as a lonely proponent of unpopular ideas. To this end they denied his biological debts, transformed Fliess into a crackpot, promoted the self-analysis beyond all reason, and ignored his intellectual affinities with his contemporaries. Sulloway’s conception of the biographers’ motives is as unnuanced as his conception of Freud’s own motives. He insists on a strictly conspiratorial view of their enterprise.

In the final segment of his book, its emotional bones are fully bared, as Sulloway’s supposedly admiring biography climaxes in an orgy of Freudian mendacity and self-promotion. It is the ultimate return of the repressed, and it exposes the depth of Sulloway’s hostility. Yet, ironically, he doesn’t quite believe the story himself. Such, at least, is the implication of the extraordinary volte-face with which the book ends:

In more ways than we can acknowledge, myth rules history with an iron grip, dictating the preservation of mythical fact and the destruction of antimyth long before the historian can even begin to reverse this relentless process. Mankind, it would seem, will not tolerate the critical assaults upon its heroes and the charitable reassessments of its villains that mythless history requires.

In many respects, then, Freud will always remain a crypto-biologist, his self-analysis will always be seen as heroic and unprecedented, and his years of discovery will always partake of a “splendid isolation” and an inscrutable genius. After all, Freud really was a hero. The myths are merely his historical due, and they shall continue to live on, protecting his brilliant legacy to mankind, as long as this legacy remains a powerful part of human consciousness. (503)

This is the only passage in Sulloway’s long book that might be described as genuinely Freudian, echoing as it does the melancholy resignation and misanthropy of the great cultural essays, above all Civilization and Its Discontents. It is also genuinely Freudian in a deeper sense, because it admits a profound truth to whose obfuscation the complex apparatus of Sulloway’s argument has been dedicated: Freud was a hero after all, a figure like Augustine, or Luther, or Darwin, or Marx, who changed the way we think.

Perhaps the final irony is that Sulloway’s supposedly contextualist revision ignores the two contexts that recent historical studies have identified as especially pertinent to an accurate understanding of Freud’s thought. The first of these is fin-de-siècle Vienna, with its peculiar blend of moribund liberalism and burgeoning anti-Semitism—a political and cultural hothouse from which a number of remarkable creations emerged. This perspective on Freud has been advanced by Carl Schorske, William McGrath, Hannah Decker, and Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, all of whom link Freud’s psychological ideas in interesting ways to the political ambience of his city. But Sulloway makes little of Vienna, and nothing of its politics. Apparently, the city’s sole contribution was to have given Freud an exaggerated impression of nineteenth-century prudery. Likewise Sulloway’s few remarks about anti-Semitism indicate that he finds its significance negligible. In fact, anti-Semitism appears in Myth 19 of his comprehensive chart cataloguing twenty-six “Major Freud Myths” (489–95).

A second context, identified in a number of scholarly studies but most impressively in H. Stuart Hughes’s Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930, is the broader configuration of European intellectual life at the turn of the century. Unlike Sulloway’s book, Consciousness and Society is not a study of influences but an attempt to identify the deep affinities that united a generation of European thinkers in a shared enterprise. Hughes places Freud in the company of such contemporaneous figures as Max Weber, Hans Vaihinger, Ernst Mach, Benedetto Croce, and Georges Sorel, who collectively brought about a dramatic shift in European intellectual concerns. Hughes calls that shift “a revolt against positivism,” by which he means the effort to liberate thought from its nineteenth-century scientific fetters and promote instead a greater attention to subjectivity.^[35] Freud’s move from neurology to psychology was paradigmatic of this intellectual reorientation, and he is, along with Weber, a central presence in Hughes’s story. A similar perspective is suggested by the substantial scholarship that links Freud with his somewhat younger contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche. But no more than fin-de-siècle Vienna does the revolt against positivism figure in Sulloway’s conception of the intellectual milieu in which psychoanalysis was born. His silence is perfectly understandable: Hughes’s argument directly contradicts Sulloway’s insistence on the enduring influence of one of the archetypal forms of nineteenth-century positivism, Darwinism. But if Hughes is correct, as I think he is, positivism was in retreat in the early twentieth century, as it came under assault, directly or indirectly, from the new philosophers of self-consciousness, Freud chief among them. Sulloway’s repeated invocation of the neglected intellectual context of Freud’s ideas thus ignores the most widespread and profound intellectual development of the age.

In the bibliographical essay appended to Freud: A Life for Our Time Peter Gay dismisses Sulloway’s book as “presenting itself as a great unmasking document but bringing the essentially old news that Freud’s theory had a biological background.”^[36] The judgment is unfair insofar as the book proposes a radically new conception of Freud’s debt to biology. But it accurately reflects Sulloway’s failure to make his case, and, more important, it identifies the true role of biology in Freud’s intellectual biography. Indeed, the flat, deflating phrase “biological background”—alluding at once to Freud’s early career in neurology and to the residual presence of biological habits of thought behind his psychological theory—nicely captures biology’s marginal position in the psychoanalytic revolution.

Perhaps the single most important thing to be said about Freud, Biologist of the Mind is that, despite its author’s extraordinary efforts, it cannot persuade us to adopt its conception of Freud’s intellectual achievement. It cannot move the periphery to the center. In this respect it resembles David Bakan’s Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, which seeks to derive all of psychoanalysis from cabalistic teachings, creating an image of Freud as a crypto-Jewish-mystic. Sulloway’s book thus leaves the traditional portrait of Freud as a psychological innovator with a biological background largely undisturbed. Appropriately, his book has not marked the watershed in Freud studies that he hoped and, I think, expected it would. Its central argument has been ignored not only by Freud’s partisans but by his enemies as well. Some part of the book’s failure must be attributed to its ambivalence toward its subject. Ostensibly, it presents Freud as an even larger figure than the person we meet in the traditional biographies—a giant whose true intellectual accomplishment has yet to be recognized. In reality, however, it belittles Freud, not merely because of its repeated charges of ruthless ambition and dishonesty, but, more important, because it diminishes the very ideas that have made him one of the most influential thinkers of the century. The Freud it pretends to unveil and celebrate is simply not the Freud of history.

At times, Sulloway seems at least dimly aware of his book’s hostile undertow. He notes that “there are many individuals sharing…a negative persuasion about psychoanalysis who might easily seize upon the substance of this book in order to bolster their arguments about the folly of Freud’s theories” (499). Sulloway assures us that his intent is just the opposite—that he ranks Freud alongside Darwin and Aristotle among the greatest figures in the life sciences. But in truth his book deserves an honored place in the anti-Freudian canon. It may not have inaugurated the scholarly transformation that Sulloway thought it would, but, in hindsight, it can be seen as the opening salvo in the campaign against Freud’s reputation that would escalate into war during the succeeding decade. The more consistently anti-Freudian writings of Jeffrey Masson are its natural successor.

Notes