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Sigmund Freud was at once the discoverer of psychoanalysis, the first psychoanalyst and the first true psychoanalytic patient. It was in his own self-analysis that he, as both the analyst and analysand, crystallized some of his most important and novel discoveries. The impact of these and all other subsequent discoveries that he made working with his patients during his long and extraordinarily productive life, on the understanding of human mental life, is unparalleled. Because of these facts and because he was a genius with a most fascinating mind who was his own most intriguing and interesting patient he has attracted a seemingly endless parade of biographers, many of them armed with an approach to understanding that he gave to the world. Not only are works on his life and work in general turned out in dizzying number but each and every aspect of his life has been subjected to microscopic inspection and speculation. All this despite the fact that he himself took a dim view of biography, writing to Arnold Zweig when he, Freud, was 80: 'Anyone who writes a biography is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy, flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth does not exist, and if it did we could not use it'.
Whether or not one agrees with Freud's assessment of biography, it is true that the deluge of biographical investigation of Freud varies greatly in the quality of scholarly contribution and understanding. One of those who has been most acclaimed for the high quality of his contributions to Freud scholarship, and justly so, is Peter Gay, Sterling Protessor of History at Yale University. In a series of books: Freud, Jews and Other Germans (1978); The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Vol. I (1984); Freud for Historians (1985); The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Vol. II (1986); A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism and the Making of Psychoanalysis (1987) and Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), he has, through t