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Any biography of Freud, even one that is shorter and more compact, invites comparison with Jones's (1953-1957)The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, which constitutes, in effect, Freud's official biography. Jones, who knew Freud and his family for many years—although not as many years as he claimed—apparently enjoyed the full cooperation of Anna Freud (The Life and Work is dedicated to her), and he had other advantages over writers on Freud before him and since. Jones, whose analytic career extended back more than a half-century, unlike most biographers of Freud, could write knowledgeably and perceptively about psychoanalysis itself, and he also was friendly or at least acquainted with almost everyone who played an important part in the psychoanalytic movement during its formative years.
But these advantages over Ronald W. Clark, Freud's latest biographer, while they give substantial support to Jones's self-proclaimed role of authoritative "insider," do not work entirely in his favor. Biographers who are close to their subjects, like journalists who are intimate with those in power, or, nearer home, analysts who are friendly with their patients, compound the transference problems in such relationships. Jones was not without such problems. Whether or not Jones is guilty of excessive partisanship in his accounts of the personality clashes and doctrinal conflicts that plagued psychoanalysis in the early period, as some have alleged, he is vulnerable to the charge that he occasionally makes too much of his own relationship with Freud, and too little of Freud's propensity to behave, at times, much like other men behave when they confront the uncertainties and problems of life.
Thus Jones writes, in his preface to the first volume, that he had been "in constant intimate contact with Freud … [and] a close friend for forty years …" (p. xiii). In fact, as he mentions elsewhere, he did not meet Freud until April 26, 1908, on which occasion he was introduced to Freud by Jung;