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In the second chapter of his new and stimulating biography, precisely in the chapter that recounts Freud's intellectual curiosity or greed for knowledge (Wissbegierde), Joel Whitebook describes the father of psychoanalysis as polytropos: ‘We will have ample opportunity’, he writes, ‘to see that Freud, like Odysseus, was polytropos’ (p. 65). Polytropos, which literally means ‘many’ (poly) ‘turn’ (tropos) in Greek, is the adjective Homer uses to describe the elusive quality of Odysseus in the first line of The Odyssey. But it is a word that is notoriously difficult to translate, not least because it raises the (analytic) question of Odysseus's role in his wanderings: is Odysseus the turned (‘by long experience tried’, ‘of many fortunes’, ‘tost to and fro by fate’) or is he the turner (‘skilled in all ways of contending’, ‘never at a loss’, ‘cunning’) (see Mason, 2017)?
Now if I single out this Greek word in a 454-page biography in English about a man who wrote and thought in German, if I underscore a word that is used by the author only in passing (though perhaps I should say ‘en passant’ [p. 9] since it would seem, from this particular biography, that an abundant use of foreign words is de rigueur), it is not only because Freud has taught us that we never only speak one language or that psychoanalysis is a kind of passactivity (‘The treatment’, Freud says, ‘must be carried out in abstinence’ [Freud, 1915, p. 165]). It is also because Whitebook's allusion to Freud as a ‘thoroughly polytropic individual’