History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Freud had the intolerance of an Ezra and the characteristic faults of the cathedocracy, he also had some of its heroic virtues: dauntless courage in the defence of what he saw as the truth; passionate industry in pursuit of it, right to the end of a life marked by unremitting labour; a saintly death, after a slow cancer for which he refused morphia: ‘I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly.’233 Arthur Koestler, who saw him at the end, found a ‘small and fragile’ sage, with ‘the indestructible vitality of a Hebrew patriarch’.234 Freud was in the irrationalist Jewish tradition, more of a Nahmanides or a Besht than a Maimonides. But, perhaps because of this, he became a central pillar of the twentieth-century intellectual structure, itself a largely irrational edifice. To vary the metaphor, he gave humanity a new mirror, and no man has ever changed so radically and irreversibly the way in which people see themselves; or indeed talk about themselves, for he changed the vocabulary of introspection too.