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The founder of psychoanalysis has been the subject of many hagiographic and hagioclastic biographies. For Freud-fanatics (Leo Stone, personal communication), e.g., Kurt Eissler, Freud was infallible; for Freud-foes. Freud was a liar (Onfray, 2010) or a paranoiac (Lothane, 1997a). Whitebook is a Freud-friend, and it is my pleasure to review his book as we have conversed about Freud’s 1911 Schreber analysis. Joining his predecessors “Ernest Jones, Peter Gay, Ronald W. Clark” (p. 15), Whitebook’s aim “is not to provide a comprehensive biography” (p. 15) but to “have succeeded in presenting a compelling account of Freud’s intellectual biography—that is the relationship between the unfolding of his thinking and crucial developments of his life history” (p. 16).
While passionate and thought-provoking, Whitebook’s biography is in fact selective: he picks one crucial episode, Freud’s alleged homosexual relationship with Fliess, not “an attempt to ‘out’ Freud, but to understand his ‘sexual identity’ more fully” (p. 15). While noting that “one naturally wonders … whether Freud ever consummated his love for Fliess sexually” (p. 184), Whitebook sees “Freud’s [as] embroiled [with] Fliess [as] object of [a] passive homosexual desire, and he wished to submit to and be penetrated by him … in the feminine/homosexual position” (p. 215), “penetrated by this powerful phallic figure” (p. 182), a shockingly sensational yet unproven conjecture. If true, the inescapable corollary is that both Freud and Schreber desired to be penetrated, except Schreber’s fantasy of turning into a pregnant woman. With this formula, Whitebook decodes Freud’s “missing mother” (p. 15), “repudiation of femininity” (p. 52), “early mother” transference to Fliess (p. 181), and even the “helplessness, castration, passivity” (p. 354) caused by his cancer.
Citing Lothane (1997b), where Fliess is discussed, and Lotto (2001), Whitebook misinterprets Lotto’s “sublimated eroticism” as meaning that “sexuality was not in fac