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Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a rendez-vous, it seems, of questions and question marks.
Psychoanalysis is an unceasing quest for origins. The collective equivalent of the investigation of an analysand's past in the clinical setting is the attempt to understand how psychoanalysis came to be what it is today through the study of its history, particularly its birth in the mind of Freud. Because, as psychoanalysis itself teaches us, the earliest years are the most important, and also because psychoanalysis is without parallel as an intellectual discipline in owing its existence to a single individual, this return to Freud on the part of psychoanalysts seeking self-understanding is both necessary and desirable. Recent volumes of essays on Freud edited by John E. Gedo and George H. Pollock and by Mark Kanzer and Jules Glenn, supplementing the indispensable earlier biographical studies by Ernest Jones, Max Schur, and others, have shown how illuminating a scrutiny of the relations between Frued's life and work can be.1
Once the value of situating psychoanalysis within the context of Freud's life has been recognized, however, a related problem suggest itself—that of situating Freud himself within the context of his intellectual milieu. Despite