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'We know that the individual is unique', says Sartre, 'but how can we say so?' The biographer, like the analyst, can suffer from too imposing a sense of what people are. Freud himself made it clear from several comments that he was sceptical of biography, particularly his own. When in 1836 Arnold Zweig threatened to become his biographer Freud wrote back: 'No, I am far too fond of you to allow such a thing to happen. 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'. Freud seems to be suggesting that the biographer 'commits' himself to an unresolvable transference to his subject (or victim); and it is this, clearly, that would be the retrospective criticism of Jones' still unsurpassed biographical study, and which makes biography of such interest. But as time has gone on the temptations in popular Freud biography have become increasingly puerile. The question becomes, what do we want to use Freud's life for, a life he once described as 'of no interest except in relation to psychoanalysis'?
While this book by Ronald Clark is tactful about Freud's privacy it is naive about his reticence, because for some people psychoanalysis is of no interest except in relation to Freud's life, a perspective that his work would seem to encourage. It is Clark's contention in this book that Freud became his own 'cause' which effectively steals the emphasis away from Freud's 'private life', a phrase refined so much by his work. Where Freud's 'personal life' becomes notoriously difficult, as in his relationship with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays, Clark becomes awkward to the point of coy vulgarity. He reassures us, as Jones could not find the need to do in quite the same way, that despite Minna's great sympathy and understanding of psychoanalysis (greater than Freud's wife), Freud's relationship with he