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One cannot be a friend to many people in the sense of having friendship of the perfect with them … But with a view to utility or pleasure it is possible that many people should please one; for many people are useful or pleasant, and these services take little time. … It is by their likeness to the friendship of virtue that they [relationships of pleasure and utility] seem to be friendships (for one of them involves pleasure and the other utility, and these characteristics belong to the friendship of virtue as well) … Now we have said that the good man is at the same time both pleasant and useful.
(Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapter 6)Gods will die that men may live.
(Nietzsche)
THE DOCUMENTATION GATHERED ON FREUD now adds up to being the most specific and insightful that we have on any individual in history.1 And yet when Arnold Zweig proposed to write a biography of Freud, he received the resounding answer that "Anyone turning biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were it couldn't be used."2 As I pored over the immense primary and secondary source material on Freud's life during the 1890's and early 1900's, at every turn I constantly became more and more aware that behind each constellation of enlightening data there were darkened spaces literally as limitless as the unconscious. It is uncontestable that the development of psychoanalysis itself presents some of the most defiant obstacles to psychohistorians. In spite of this, I hope to have succeeded in rectifying the story of this period which was concurrently Freud's middle age and the infancy of psychoanalysis. Laboring under the handicap of not seeing