Becoming Freud by Adam Phillips

Utter the name Freud and people will often respond with obvious emotion. Even if they have never read one of Freud’s two-dozen books, his thousands of letters or one of the many biographies, Freud’s name evokes a reaction, and not always positive (which of course means something). While Darwin explored the biological evolution of humans, Galileo explored the heavens, and Columbus discovered new continents, Freud set out on a different type of journey. He sought to discover the vast unexplored territories that exist within each of us. Freud didn’t want to simply describe human behavior; rather he wanted to understand the hidden sub-conscious motivations of individual human behavior.

Though I have read several books about different aspects of Freud’s life, I recently reread Adam Phillips’ incisive and illuminating 162-page biography, Becoming Freud The Making of an Analyst. Using lucid language, Phillips, a psychoanalyst himself, insightfully conveys Freud’s journey from young Jewish medical school student to the creator of psychoanalysis. Phillips argues that because Freud experienced persistent anti-Semitism, he reconciled himself to pursuing a less conventional professional path. In addition, Phillips believes that Freud was fortunate that the power of religious explanation was losing its authority toward the end of the 19th century. Freud did make some erroneous judgments and conclusions, yet his quest to develop words to connect to emotion was unprecedented. Phillips acknowledges these limitations yet also explores the confluence of factors that propelled Freud toward his theories of the internal emotional development of human beings, something that didn’t exist prior to Freud. In this, he reminds us that in attempting to uncover the continent of the unconscious Freud remains the original explorer or the human psyche.

Here are my six favorite Philips’ quotes that succinctly capture the essence of a few of Freud’s theories.

“Freud will show us how and why we bury the facts of our lives, and how, through the language of psychoanalysis, we can both retrieve these facts and describe them in a different way.” p. 4

“In Freud’s view we are defensive creatures simply because we have so much to defend ourselves against; our fears of the external world are second only to our fear of the internal world of memory and desire, and both are warranted (it was Freud that made the ordinary word “defense” such an important part of common currency). “ p. 8

“What some modern people couldn’t help but notice after Freud, through their symptoms, their dreams, their slips of the tongue and their bungled ambitions, -especially modern people who were no longer religious believers was how unconscious they were, how removed from a clear sense of their own intentions, how determinedly ignorant they were about their pleasure.” p. 14

“And the truths of psychoanalysis Freud would find, are often revealed by the repetitions in people’s lives, in the things that keep happening to them, and the things they keep doing despite themselves, and that therefore insist on being thought about.” p.28

“What he called the “transference” in his fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (the Dora case) what the patient transferred on to the doctor as expectation, hope, and fear –Freud would see as the essential clue to the patient’s suffering. p. 130

“The dream, like the joke, reveals people, from a psychoanalytic point of view, to be in hiding; consciously in hiding from the disapproving others, but unconsciously hiding from themselves. “ p.144

Though people criticize Freud, I for one, am grateful for his desire to understand people, not judge them. Adam Phillips’s excellent book provides a clear and concise description of Freud’s trajectory toward becoming an analyst. Phillips acknowledges Freud’s important breakthrough in identifying a language that helps people understand their behavior and the behavior of others. No matter what you think of Freud, his contribution to humanity is akin to that of other early scientists. We remember him not because every one of his ideas is still considered correct, but because he started us down the road to a better understanding of the human condition.