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‘As for the biographers, let them worry, we have no desire to make it too easy for them. Each one of them will be right in his opinion of “The Development of the Hero”, and I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray.’ (Letter from Sigmund Freud to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, dated April 28, 1885 ( 153), in which he tells her he has destroyed many of his papers.)
Sigmund Freud was fortunate in more than one way. First, his father was a Jew who had no talent for trade, although he made it his calling; he was, on the other hand, a self-taught man and an unbeliever who professed liberal and modern ideas. Sigmund's half-brothers, from his father's previous marriage to Sally Kanner, and another, younger brother chose respectively to engage in business or to teach its skills, succeeding where their father had failed. Sigmund himself, after receiving a comprehensive education and becoming a man of science, achieved success on an intellectual plane: it was the kind of success which his father had always desired, and the desire for which he had transmitted to Sigmund.
Freud's second good fortune was to have been conceived by a vivacious, cheerful and gentle young woman who had just married a widower twenty years her senior, and whose proud, loving passion for her first-born son gave him early stimulation, a strong sense of security and faith in life, great familiarity with incestuous desire, and the degree of masochism vital to any creator.
His third stroke of luck was to have spent three blissful years of freedom in the country, surrounded by a kind of ‘primal horde’ and a multitude of languages, creeds, cultures and social classes.
Freud's first misfortune – premature exile at the age of about three and a half – turned out in fact to be yet another boon: a person creates not by