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A biographer of Sigmund Freud is likely to leave a discernible personal imprint on a work. Since we live in a Freudian age today, one is either a Freudian or an anti-Freudian.1 One who is neither is hardly a denizen of the modern world. Élisabeth Roudinesco, a prolific historian and psychoanalyst, has written extensively on psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan. The present biography of Freud was written in French, published in 2014, and published in in English two years later. It is an account of Freud that emphasizes his social and political position rather than highlighting him as a scientist, a designation he preferred. “Freud always thought that what he was discovering in the unconscious foreshadowed what was happening to people in reality,” she writes. “I have chosen to reverse this proposition and show that what Freud thought he was discovering was at bottom nothing but the product of a society, a familial environment, and a political situation whose signification he interpreted masterfully so as to ascribe it to the work of the unconscious” (p. 4). In this interesting reversal, the emphasis is displaced from seeing psychoanalysis as concerned primarily with psychology and intrapsychic phenomena to viewing them as secondary. Paying particular attention to the era in which Freud lived, the biographer emphasizes a contemporaneous view of his life and work.
The book follows the chronology of its subject's life, starting with his early development, important familial relationships, the “invention” of psychoanalysis, his success, his progress through the First World War to his death. Roudinesco was aided by her access to the Freud Archives, now available in the Library of Congress and open for public inspection. The first