A Rich, Wonderful Journey Inside The Mind

Sun Herald

Sunday October 29, 2006

Reviewed by John Clare

The Gods Of Freud: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection

Janine Burke

(Knopf, $49.95)

IN Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister, a certain Professor Krug is pruning his books before fleeing an unnamed totalitarian regime.

He makes passing reference to "the Viennese witch doctor" - clearly a dismissal of Sigmund Freud, whose ideas he sees as a polluting stream of modern thought, along with those of Marx, Engels and company.

Nabokov seems to have shared his character's view, yet admired James Joyce, a writer certainly influenced by Freud. In his last years Freud also had to flee totalitarianism, that of the Nazis.

Many of us have a grab-bag of associations - most of them dubious these days - with the name Freud. The above is one of many triggered for me by Janine Burke's rich and wonderful book. Where they were taking me I could not say. The book always took over.

Witch doctor? Freud's study was populated by his precious, ever-growing collection of Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Etruscan and oriental art. The doctor often paused in his writing to study one of his "old and grubby gods", which he also used as paperweights.

Freud's ideas can be seen, in no small part, as the finding of parallels in human behaviour with the actions of gods and dramatis personae from antiquity. They too were savagely jealous, libidinous, moved by dreams and desirous of their mothers (in one famous case anyway).

Even Freud's notorious theory of penis envy was obliquely related to the Oedipus complex. These are archetypes excavated from the unconscious, an idea developed, along more mystical lines than Freud would tolerate, by Carl Jung.

Burke reveals Freud as an astute and passionate art collector and an entranced student of archaeology - who was not above purchasing objects made available by tomb robbers - in opposition to a view of him as "stern, remote, austere and forbidding".

But the collection is a theme accompanied by the development of Freud's thought. The art and the ideas were always in symbiotic relationship.

The collection was also a refuge. Freud took it with him on family holidays.

Burke's book is also a brilliant narration of Freud's life, drawing from many sources, including Ernest Jones's authorised biography.

Her expert descriptions of important works in the collection (always related to Freudian ideas that sprang from them), her explication of family relationships, Freud's conflicted attitude to his Jewishness, his troubled relationship with Jung and, most fascinating and revealing of all, with his patient and friend Hilda Doolittle (the poet H.D.), are beautifully modulated, scholarly, and very easy to read.

Freud was also a nature lover. An early, never-healed rupture in his life occurred when his family moved to Vienna from Freiberg, a town near forests and ringed by mountains in Moravia. It is easy to imagine the mature Freud as a sophisticate at home in a city that was becoming a centre of avant garde music. Freud loathed Vienna, sharing Hitler's view of Austria as a poor imitation of Germany.

Tramping through forests and ruins at a speed that often left his companions floundering was one of several ultra-masculine behavioural characteristics (chain-smoking cigars was another) that would have marked Freud as a typical bourgeois Victorian gent if it were not for other complications.

To Freud's discomfort, Hilda Doolittle saw him as a mother figure!

Freud's bourgeois view of the role of women was at odds with the prominence he gave in his collection to powerful female gods, and with his encouragement of female thinkers and artists - this in turn being at odds with the role he assigned his wife.

Once again we find ourselves asking whether Freud was indeed a modern witch doctor; purveyor of sophistries and voodoo.

Freud did not like modern art - not even Impressionism. He preferred the past to impressions of an "indeterminate present", however vivid and sensual.

The Surrealists - "who apparently have adopted me as their patron saint" - he regarded as "complete fools", perhaps because they seemed to revel in the irrational, while Freud sought to rationalise it.

However valuable or not Freud's ideas have been in practice, they are certainly interesting, and in many ways they were far less witch-doctorish than some of the explanations for mental distress that were held at the time he began his work.

Interviewed by literary journalist Susan Wyndham, Burke said "I don't have the traditional feminine fight with Freud . . . though I rap him over the knuckles for the stupid theory of penis envy".

I have read only one other book by Janine Burke - Australian Gothic: A Life Of Albert Tucker. It is excellent, but this one surpasses it. The Tucker book was unillustrated, due to a dispute with Tucker's first wife. This has two sets of lovely plates.