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“Transference, like every object relationship, is always ambivalent,” observed the psychoanalyst Charles Brenner. “While positive wishes may be more openly expressed than negative ones during an analysis … its opposite is always present and active nonetheless” (1995, 418). That same dichotomy exists for the biographer with regard to his subject. And for the reader of that biography. Only gradually did I come to understand that the reader's reactions are often easier to confront than the writer's. My sense is that writing a biography is like gazing into a convex mirror whose reflection contains clues—albeit unnaturally distanced ones—about our own unconscious conflicts. As biographers we tell ourselves that we are writing objectively. We seldom realize that we are examining our subject through the prism of our own ambivalences, through a psychological lens which, like a convex mirror, curves outward to highlight certain images and diminish others.
There is much that is uncanny in this. Transferences shift past relations into the present. In their own retrievals of the past, so do biographies. That a biographer should choose past figures who mirror the writer's transference relations in her own life thus should come as no surprise. Yet often the parallels, not to mention the consequences, do surprise. Certainly I was blindsided. Shortly after I finished the second of the two biographies about powerful but otherwise dissimilar women, both of whom exercised their authority without hesitation, my own marriage dissolved over the issues of power, autonomy and professional accomplishments—real or perceived—that on a greatly magnified scale had fascinated me in my biographical subjects.