The Objects Of Freud's Desire

The Age

Saturday November 4, 2006

HELEN HAYWARD

BOOK REVIEW: Gods of Freud By Janine Burke Knopf, $49.95

Janine Burke's tale of Sigmund Freud's passion for antiquities is gripping, writes Helen Hayward.

THIS IS A STORY OF Sigmund Freud's life, told through his lifelong passion for antiquities. Janine Burke displaces the customary view of Freud the godless Jew, by giving a complex and subtle picture of a man who sought out objects that embodied his belief that the present becomes real through association with the past.

She draws a picture of Freud as deeply spiritual; someone who, through a blend of strength and vulnerability, created a living museum in his study. It's an intimate story, given depth and credence by Burke's wealth of learning.

On the one hand Freud described himself as "nothing but a conquistador, an adventurer" when it came to collecting, at times willing to hand over money he didn't have to dealers on the black market; for whom - like all collectors - enough is never enough.

Antiquities and cigars were Freud's addictions, but they were also what made his creative concentration possible. By the end of Freud's life he had amassed more than 2500 pieces. "I must always have an object to love," he explained to Jung.

On the other hand, Burke touchingly reveals the private world into which all these objects came. A bit like the Magic Toyshop, these statues, urns, bowls, parchments and even mummy bandages came alive, amid the smoke and lamplight by which Freud often wrote.

Unlike in a museum, where pieces are encased for years on end, Freud moved his objects around daily; he touched them, communed with them. On the top of his increasingly crowded desk, Athena - or perhaps Isis or Eros - would encapsulate an idea for him as he worked. Animism, the belief that objects have a communicable soul and can invoke the gods, was in Freud's mind a more powerful influence on human nature than the other two "great pictures of the universe", religion and science.

You have to be game to write about Freud, and Janine Burke proves she is well up to it. She traces Freud's life from his childhood in Moravia, where he would escape family tensions in the neighbouring forest, to his early schooling in Vienna, where he was the only member of his family to have his own room, to his discovery of Paris (namely Notre Dame and Charcot - who taught him that it was by eavesdropping that nature's secrets would be revealed), to the clash of his high ambitions and lowly standing as a young scientist in Vienna (he regarded teaching as nothing short of slavery), to his marriage and lease of a splendid flat, and to his sudden return to a modest apartment in a Jewish neighbourhood, where his children and his clinical practice slowly grew up.

But all this, in Burke's book, is just the beginning. For only now did Freud's collecting begin in earnest. Overcoming his inhibition against travelling in southern Europe meant a whole world was opened to him.

Letters to his family, with whom Freud didn't share his passion, were ecstatic. His particular love was Egyptian art, whose cool elegant forms, and devotion to death, appealed to him. His interests were further fired by the huge finds from archaeological digs of the period - Troy, Pompeii, Crete - which were front-page news at the time.

But Rome was the place Freud was drawn to most; he loved the idea that the past could be unearthed, and that - once unearthed - could play a part in the present.

Vienna too was a Roman town - Freud would analyse it, like a patient's mind, during his daily "constitutional". It was also Catholic and anti-Semitic - and quicker to react with suspicion than admiration to his theories about hysteria and dreams. Not until his 40s was he "met" intellectually, forming a close-knit group (each of whom had an identical ring), which later split.

Burke gives generous detail on Freud's friendships and professional life. Often these merged - Fliess, Jung, Marie Bonaparte, H. D., and his ambitious daughter Anna. But Burke's real and often copious attention is given to the artefacts themselves (there were points at which - as a reader - I could have done with a little less detail).

The story really grips towards the end. For Freud and his family, departure in the face of Hitler's invasion of Austria wasn't inevitable; it only became so when events overtook them. At which point Freud was forced to lean on influential friends, pack up his "old and grubby gods", and leave the city that he finally admitted he loved.

He is lucky to have such a loyal and fluent biographer in Janine Burke.

Helen Hayward is writing The Sweetest Burden: Motherhood's Early Years.