At the public library, searching for a copy of Sigmund Freud’s case histories, I found many shelves devoted to this writings.  There were enough volumes to fill a room.  In addition to practicing medicine, proselytizing for psychoanalysis, and caring for a family with six children, Freud wrote.  He wrote scientific and scholarly articles about analysis, medicine, art, literature and his own life.  It’s hard to imagine a practicing doctor today finding the time to sit and write like that, or even to sit and think like that.  It was a different time, and Freud was a different kind of doctor. 

Freud corresponded with colleagues, friends and patients too.  He wrote letters, by hand, in French and English as well as German, in a florid, looping script that leans dramatically to the right.  That slant is an indicator, apparently, of “acute intelligence,” one that’s single-minded and that does not easily admit other points of view.  It’s very different, for example, from Karl Jung’s more hesitant, perpendicular handwriting, which indicates a “profound intelligence,” one broader and more open to influence.  I much prefer Freud’s writing, an inky, artful mess, to Jung’s childlike horizontal scrawl.  I especially like the way Freud’s letters are crammed together on the page.  It’s baroque, passionate and personal.  It’s as if he’s in a rush to get out the flood of words, that is, of thoughts, and as if he finds physical pleasure in the act of writing.  His work relied deeply on language, and this shows in his hand.