Sigmund Freud, Psychohistorian

Suppose the only books Sigmund Freud ever wrote were his two psychohistorical monographs, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood and Moses and Monotheism. What would their impact have been? They concerned subjects about whom little reliable biographical data existed, and Freud tended to emphasize the more obscure aspects of those data. His synthesis and interpretation of the data derived from a theoretical system accepted at the time by no reputable biographer or historian. Published in isolation, the books would have passed into obscurity, and the name of Sigmund Freud would be long forgotten.

Of course Freud did write other books and papers, a total of twenty-three substantial volumes in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. The entire body of Freud's work, ranging from theoretical discussions to detailed case histories, invests any part of it with clinical or cultural significance. Thus the monographs on Leonardo and Moses have continued to receive attention as part of the authentic Freudian oeuvre. Indeed, although those monographs and a scattering of similar but briefer works constitute less than five percent of Freud's total wordage, they have if anything been given disproportionate attention. For example, the seventy-page Leonardo book was recently the subject of a 260-page commentary (Collins, 1997), while in the past decade the Moses book was the main focus of at least half a dozen substantial scholarly monographs (e.g., Grubrich-Simitis, 1997; Bernstein, 1998; Said, 2003). Attention to Freud's psychohistories has often been negative, emphasizing the inadequacies of his work as biography or history, or his confusion of his own personal issues with the character and achievements of his subjects. Yet Freud's tentative but pioneering efforts of six to nine decades ago launched a scholarly approach that has largely taken over the field of biography and has made significant inroads into history and cultural studies. W