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If we count Freud's own ‘On the history of the psychoanalytic movement’ (Freud, 1914) as the first example of its type, then we are fast approaching the centenary of Freud biography. In Freud studies each new writer faces again the challenge that Freud himself described when he revisited his own history ten years later, in An Autobiographical Study:
I must endeavour to construct a narrative in which subjective and objective attitudes, biographical and historical interests, are combined in a new proportion. (Freud, 1925, p. 7)
At a certain point during the past century of biographies and biographical documentation (a point we have already long passed), a law of diminishing historical returns set in. A composite image of Freud took possession of the common imagination and each new biography only managed to modify some detail or other. How can one nowadays bring to life a biographical image once it has become such a pervasive spectre? One answer might be to focus on one specific topic or period. Another would be to combine discursive and historical narratives in a new proportion. Each of these three books has, with greater or lesser success, adopted these tactics. And, as I shall show, each puts its respective Freud to a different use.
The first of them, Matthew von Unwerth's Freud's Requiem, focuses with highest magnification on the smallest episode. In 1915 when war and death preoccupied Europe Freud wrote an 1100-word occasional piece inspired by a memory of better times. In the bibliography of a Pelican edition of Freud's works it figures as ‘On transcience’ and this misprint draws attention