Freud the Man. An Intellectual Biography Lydia Flem and Susan Fairfield (trans.) New York:  Other Press, 2003  224 pp., £21.50 The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham 1907-1925 E.. Falzeder (ed.) Caroline Schwarzacher (trans.) London:  Karnac Books 2002  650 pp. £45.00

Conquistador, surgeon, archivist and sculptor; chemist, chess player and jigsaw-puzzle solver; archaeologist, explorer, detective and gambler. These are just some of the identities that Freud offers to describe the role of the psychoanalyst, and which Lydia Flem explores in her wonderful book,

Freud the Man. Rather than a purely biographical study, as the title might suggest, this book allows us to peer over Freud's shoulder in the process of writing, to watch him at play ‘with ink, words and paper’ (p. 134), with the spirits of Virgil, Sophocles, Shakespeare and - above all - Goethe hovering about him. As the original French title, L'homme Freud, suggests, this book is closer in mood to the imaginative explorations of Freud's own L'homme Moses (re-titled in English as Moses and Monotheism] than to the more straightforwardly biographical works of Ernest Jones or Peter Gay.

In each of the 10 chapters Flem voyages around different metaphorical configurations found in Freud's work, discovering ‘an infinite kaleidoscope of figurative expressions, comparisons and analogies’ (p. 169) that permeate Freud's writings. Because the patterns are always changing, Flem argues, Freud ‘never offers the reader a conclusive, dogmatic text but instead an always open construction site, research in progress, thinking as it is being thought, and he invites his reader to accompany him step by step, in vivo’ (p. 169). We might say that the reader is asked to follow Freud on an ‘imaginary walk’, to borrow the phrase that Freud used to describe the shape of The Interpretation of Dreams. The structure of this book, as Freud acknowledged in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, was taken not from traditional academic theses, but from Dante's Divine Comedy, with the hero first lost in a dark wood (previous theories of dreams) before being led, gradually but surely, towards the light of true understanding.

Flem suggests that the experience the reader of Freud's work is asked to go through mirrors the proc