By Adam Phillips
Yale University Press, £18.99
There seems to be an insatiable appetite for books about Sigmund Freud, despite the displacement of psychoanalysis as a practice of psychotherapy by cognitive behaviour therapy and other hybrids combining talking, thinking and doing.
Maybe this is because psychoanalysis was genuinely a revolutionary movement - not in the sense of going round in circles, as many might think, but of producing something completely new. Freud changed the way people see themselves and the world, after which it is impossible to return to where we were before. Who, nowadays, does not have an unconscious?
Adam Phillips is a respected British writer on psychoanalysis, a prolific author of short and sometimes whimsical books on what it means to be a person in this post-Freudian world. This new volume appears in Yale's Jewish Lives series, "a major series of interpretive biography designed to illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy" and so on.
So far as I know, Phillips has not previously written much about Jewish issues, though he did once famously appear on a Jewish Book Week panel on the "Jewish mind", where he claimed to have nothing to say on the subject.
In Becoming Freud, Phillips offers a slightly curious and provocative exploration of how Freud "became" a psychoanalyst, the first of a new breed, including thoughts on how this might have related to his Jewish identity and social context. Phillips does not reference much of the now voluminous scholarly work on this topic, but he has an astute awareness of what might be quirky and subversive in Freud's thought, and of how this could have related to his Jewishness.
Without really getting to grips with the debate about psychoanalysis as a "Jewish science", Phillips asks useful questions about the importance for Freud's "becoming" of the marginality and migrancy of Jews in 19th-century Europe, their restlessness and their self-illusions. He suggests, for example, that for Freud the Catholic Church remained a more serious enemy than the Nazis, as if old familiar fears acted as a protective screen against terrifying new ones.
He also reinstates the relatively neglected domain of Freud's domestic life - his wife and six children - as a vital source of his thinking about the importance of everyday family events in forging unconscious dilemmas.
A major theme of the book is the impossibility of biography - how psychoanalysis reveals that what we think we know about someone is mostly speculation. It does not get us any closer to Freud or his "Jewish life" but does create a new round of thinking about this subject, which is perhaps all it set out to do.
Stephen Frosh is the author of 'Hate and the Jewish Science' and 'Hauntings', both published by Palgrave.
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.