The Passions of the Mind

My latest addiction is Irving Stone. I’ve always enjoyed his work but somehow, rereading it has brought me more pleasure than any other author has in a long time. The last book I read was ‘Depths of Glory’ about Camille Pissarro. I think I particularly enjoyed it because I love Impressionism though.

At the moment, I’m reading ‘The Passions of the Mind’ about Sigmund Freud. And I’m bored almost out of my mind. The book seems to be similar to the last one except that instead of descriptions of numerous paintings, it’s filled with descriptions of endless neuroses.

I don’t claim to have ever understood Freud. I don’t think that I particularly want to understand him either. Somehow, the idea that every neurosis has its roots in human sexuality is a theory that I find very difficult to swallow.

What astonished me though is how badly Freud’s books did. Of the six hundred copies of ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ which were initially printed, very few were actually sold, for example. When I read about his publisher complaining about only a hundred and twenty-three copies being sold despite the fact that books on the subject were popular, I could help but wonder how it was that such a large amount of his work actually survived.

Another thing which surprised me was the anti-Semitism in Austria. Earlier, I had only read about it in the most academic of terms and somehow, its portrayal in the book, fiction though it is, made it seem much more real. And for some reason, I couldn’t help but wonder how, or even if, all of Freud’s work survived WW II and what happened to his family.

Somehow, every time I think of anyone who belonged to the nineteenth century, it’s always in terms of their belonging to history books. Reading biographies has, however, made me realise in a way I never did before that these were not people who belonged to some long forgotten era. They are people who often lived into the twentieth century, whose children and grandchildren were almost certainly affected by the Holocaust.
Speaking of persons relegated to the pages of history texts, the book also contained a poignant description of the Hapsburgs: of the Emperor Franz Josef plodding on while the Empress, Elizabeth of Bavaria, who having developed a distaste for Vienna, toured Europe and was later assassinated, of the Crown Prince Rudolf who was forced into a marriage with Stephanie of Belgium and later had his attempt at obtaining an annulment thwarted by his father, of the untried Archduke Ferdinand who was to become Emperor after the Crown Prince died in a double suicide with the seventeen-year-old Baroness Marie Vetsera at Mayerling. Her body ‘was removed and buried without ceremony in the monastery of Heiligenkreuz’, his was placed in the Crown Prince’s apartment in Vienna till his coffin was placed in the crypt of the Capuchin Church.

Coming back to Irving Stone, the dedication on the book says that he’s written twenty-five books. I’d like to begin collecting them.