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IN A LETTER to his betrothed, Martha Bernays, dated April 28, 1885, Sigmund Freud wrote:
"I have just carried out one resolution which one group of people, as yet unborn and fated to misfortune, will feel acutely. Since you can't guess whom I mean I will tell you: they are my biographers. I have destroyed all my diaries of the past fourteen years, with letters, scientific notes and the manuscripts of my publications. Only family letters were spared… Let the biographers chafe; we won't make it too easy for them. Let each one of them believe he is right in his 'Conception of the Development of the Hero': even now I enjoy the thought of how they will go astray." [Jones comments:] While appreciating Freud's concluding chuckle in this interesting phantasy we nevertheless dare to hope that the last words may prove to have been exaggerated [16a].
The genetic approach, implemented by reconstructions of the past, is one of the fundamentals of psychoanalysis. The facts upon which such reconstructions are based are frequently hard to obtain, be it due to the forces of repression, or to realistic unavailability of crucial information. In attempting to study the germinal