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Sigmund Freud, as befits his towering role in 20th-century culture, has attracted many biographers. Ernest Jones wrote the three-volume story of his life and work meant to enshrine the master's legacy for the future. Peter Gay, one of the great historians of the Enlightenment and 18th-century bourgeois Europe, who admires Freud enormously, wrote a magisterial account of Freud as one of the best specimens of the enlightened bourgeoisie (1989). Frank Sulloway, much more critical of Freud, wrote the indispensible Freud, Biologist of the Mind (1992), showing how deeply rooted Freud's theories were in the sciences of his times while also diagnosing the ways in which he laid the ground for psychoanalysis's subsequent self-immunization from the edifice of modern science. And then there is, of course, the unending spate of books trying to discredit not only Freud's work but also his character, like Michel Onfray's The Twilight of an Idol (2012), which doesn't unearth a single new fact but makes every effort to put the known ones into as unpleasant a picture as possible.
Adam Phillips's Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst is a refreshing addition to the extant corpus for a number of reasons. The Freud Wars about the utterly useless question of whether Freud was humanity's liberator or a charlatan do not preoccupy Phillips at all, even though his oeuvre attests that he considers Freud to be sufficiently fascinating to make him a major character in each of his previous 17 books, and now he finally gets to present his own, favorite Freud.
Phillips occupies an interesting position in the psychoanalytic literature. On the one hand, Richard Banville called him “one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time,” and the eminent literary critic Frank Kermode hailed him as “the most important psychoanalytic essayist of our time” (both quoted in Fearn, 2001). On the other hand, it is hardly possible to find his works in the curricula of any psychoanalyt