Boswell's Clap and other essays: medical analyses of literary men's afflictions

thematic claim that Freud should be understood primarily not as a "pure psychologist" but as a "biologist of the mind" is hardly new. The neurological and evolutionary inputs into Freud have been traced and accepted by most recent scholars. Second, Dr. Sulloway offers his book as "comprehensive". Despite its 600 pages, it certainly isn't. The development of Freud's views after about 1900 is quite sketchily treated. In particular the biological matrices of later preoccupying interests such as the death-wish do not receive anything like the in-depth investigation accorded to earlier concepts such as the origin of the neuroses, or to hysteria. And above all, Dr. Suloway's book is not "comprehensive" in that he has relatively little to say about the central concern of Freud's project: psychoanalysis as a clinical practice, as therapy. He offers no close analysis of how far Freud's scientific, biological, commitments determined how he would interpret patients' statements when on the couch. Freud's practice focussed upon associations, slips of the tongue, jokes, dreams. He was primarily sensitive to the meanings of words (and word-blockages: e.g. his fascination with aphasia). Probably Freud's practice as a clinician owed less to natural science than to his lifelong passion for symbols, mythology, comparative religion, art, etymology, linguistics, and a whole range of hermeneutic disciplines. It would be silly to reduce our understanding of Freud to the question of whether he owed more to biology than to other, more "humanistic", intellectual "influences" (or how much was "pure genius"). Yet Dr. Sulloway's crusade for Freud the biologist fails to give so many other sides of his multi-faceted mind a fair crack of the whip. Biology will explain many themes in Freud extremely well (e.g. his understanding of neurosis). But when trying to contextualize his interest, say, in parapraxis, the literary, religious, and mystical roots of the unconscious, as charted exhaustively by Ellenberger, are a better guide. Moreover, Dr. Sulloway is occasionally in danger of losing sight of Freud's real originality in trying to pin him down as a biologist. He correctly notes, for example, that one important source of Freud's information on infantile sexual arousal was Fliess's observation of his son's stimulation at the sight of his naked mother. Fliess's communication triggered off in Freud an awareness of similar experiences of his own. But what such recollections meant to Freud the adult; how his adult sexuality and neuroses were a consequence of infant …