You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The first question that a new biographer of Sigmund Freud must answer is why. Why would one write a biography of Freud despite the existence of more than thirty of them, including an exhaustive three-volume chronicle by Ernest Jones (1953) and the definitive version written by Peter Gay (1988)? Elisabeth Roudinesco confronts this question right at the beginning of her work. Her answer is that she not only has access to new details but also has a perspective that clarifies Freud's contribution while resisting the hagiographic impulse that dominates Jones's account and others.
Roudinesco recounts that she hesitated before taking on the project, but that in part the situation in France drove her onward. She writes, “The opening of the archives and access to the entire set of yet unmined documents made [my] approach possible, and the task was encouraged by the fact that no French historian had yet ventured on the terrain, which had long been dominated by first-rate research in English” (p. 3). In France, even more than in the Anglophone world, Freud's reputation desperately needed a revaluation, thanks to Michel Onfray's popular diatribe against Freud in 2010, Le Crépuscule d'une idole (The Twilight of an Idol) and the earlier attack on Freudian psychoanalysis in general put together in 2005 by Catherine Meyer, Le Livre noir de la psychanalyse (The Black Book of Psychoanalysis).
In response to this climate in France and to a lesser extent around the world, Roudinesco's book represents an effort to set the record straight. Though she is a clear partisan of Freud and psychoanalysis, Roudinesco, much to her credit, includes several unfavorable details about Freud, including his need to turn close friends into enemies, his belief in a government led by an aristocracy of sages, and his severe underestimation of Nazism. She also does not sidestep the fact that Freud based so much of his reading of Leonardo da Vinci on a mistranslation of the Italian word nibio that led him to t