Freud, Zweig, and Biography

Those who write about psychoanalytic biographies seldom fail to quote the following well-known passage from Freud's essay on Leonardo da Vinci (4).

… biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special way. In many cases they have chosen their hero as the subject of their studies because—for reasons of their personal emotional life—they have felt a special affection for him from the very first. They then devote their energies to a task of idealization, aimed at enrolling the great man among the class of their infantile models—at reviving in him, perhaps, the child's idea of his father. To gratify this wish they obliterate the individual features of their subject's physiognomy; they smooth over the traces of his life's struggles with internal and external resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestige of human weakness or imperfection. They thus present us with what is in fact a cold, strange, ideal figure, instead of a human being to whom we might feel ourselves distantly related. That they should do this is regrettable, for they thereby sacrifice truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile fantasises abandon the opportunity of penetrating the most fascinating secrets of human nature.

Edel (2) recently, and Beres (1) not long before, noted in this the striking one-sidedness of Freud's estimation, which excludes, for instance, the hostile or destructive impulses that can be demonstrated not infrequently to motivate the biographer in the choice or the treatment of his subject. Edel suggested that the common Victorian biography having been one of adulation may have influenced Freud to express himself as he did. Having ventured into the field of biography with Leonardo, Freud must have viewed his revolutionary innovation against the background of conventional biography. There is, however, some evidence that Freud, careful clinician that he was, made his interpretation under the impact of some vivid, fresh clinical experience.

Stefan Zweig, wh