MORTAL SECRETS

A significant biography with more than the usual emphasis on the vagaries of the subject’s reputation.

Prolific novelist and clinical psychologist Tallis, whose most recent nonfiction book was The Act of Living, declares that few major thinkers have been more vilified than Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). However, writes the author, “extreme Freud bashing” is offset by equally “unhelpful,” overly reverent followers. An admirer but definitely not a worshipper, Tallis provides an expert portrait of a brilliant, obsessive, ruthless figure who was “right about some things and wrong about others.” He was also a talented yet “very uneven” writer whose scientific papers are often an exercise in “narrative embellishment and opportunistic misrepresentation.” An ambitious young neurologist in an era when psychological disorders were viewed as brain disease, Freud was not the first to consider them the result of traumatic memories or to employ the “talking cure,” but his charisma, energy, and literary skills produced “a new way of understanding the mind, relationships, history and culture.” Freud’s later writings demonstrate that colleagues were outraged at first and shunned him, but Tallis writes bluntly that this is fiction. Vienna’s late-19th-century Golden Age was open to new ideas in the arts and sciences, and Freud soon attracted a loyal following. By the time of his 1909 U.S. tour, he was an international celebrity. Since his death, neuroscience and therapeutic advances have not been kind to some of his theories, and some readers may agree with Tallis’ comparison to Karl Marx. Both revealed genuine insights into the human condition that don’t translate into practical benefits. Marxist economics has a poor record, and psychoanalysis is not “a cure—or, as cures go, not a very good one.” Yet Freud remains a profound influence on modern culture.

Convincingly critical and convincingly admiring—among the best of innumerable Freud bios.