Profile of a Latency Woman: Development for Biographers

Since Studies in Hysteria, psychoanalytic case studies and biographies have grown up together. They have been related like step-siblings, from the same father. And they both show his parenting influence, but not in the same way. Case writing has grown with psychoanalysis, becoming more and more sophisticated while incorporating—as Freud's own practice forecast—complex understandings of clinical perspectives, complex theoretical debates, and attention to the historical and social contexts of cases, the environments of diseases. But biography writing has never had a rich tradition of psychoanalytic reflection and methodological sophistication. Its practice still chiefly depends on “content analysis” as the Studies in Hysteria did; intricacy comparable to that of the Wolf Man case has largely eluded it.

On the model of Freud's case writing practice, which he applied to subjects like Leonardo to produce “pathography,” his early followers wrote a rich library of case-like biography writing, an achievement that compelled the whole art of biography in the twentieth century toward psychoanalysis, if not directly or doctrinairely, then indirectly, as a matter of cultural osmosis or absorption of the psychoanalytic “climate of opinion.” On the other hand, the genre influence did not flow so strongly in the other direction, and psychoanalysis itself has only recently become biographical—in two senses. First and most obviously, in the late 1950s the history of psychoanalysis began to be written as a biographical history, a history of clinicians and the depth psychological sources of their