The Mind and the Mind's Image of Itself1

In one of his less ephemeral moments Lytton Strachey claimed for himself that he had destroyed for ever that famous institution of historiography, the three-volume biography. One can see what he meant. Those great memorial structures, contrived out of chill marble prose, which sat upon a man as heavily as a tomb, and, like a tomb, prevented him from walking abroad, from re-entering life—these would no longer be erected. And Strachey contributed to this.

It was left to Ernest Jones, after a life's work of the highest distinction, at an age when many men might be thinking of their own monument, to revive what Strachey had set out to destroy: but with a difference. Jones revived the three-volume biography because he managed to make of it a home in which a man could survive, not a tomb in which he was interred. In his life of Freud, Freud lives.

We know how Jones did this. His biography of Freud is the story not just of one great man, but also of an enterprise: of what is, to my mind, the most exciting, the most courageous, the most poignant adventure in the history of western ideas. In this adventure Ernest Jones had played a major role. And, again, Jones as a biographer had the enormous advantage of possessing a technique that biographers have increasingly come to realize is indispensable to their work: psychoanalytic understanding. Jones's deep experience, his inner relation to the technique, taught him two things: how to apply psychoanalysis, and when not to. His discretion, his lack of presumption, his respect for Freud are everywhere in evidence, and they have their reward in the delicacy, the sfumato they give to the portrait.

My thoughts turn to one passage in the first volume where Jones discusses the central curiosity in Freud's life: how someone who was deeply imbued in high 19th-century ideas, who throughout his life adhered to the strictest notions of decorum—ideas and notions, it must be said, that some of us today find almost incomprehensible