The admonitions against attempting biography are many and varied, yet the urge to recreate a life and to chronicle it remains intense. In fact, the appeal of the "life story" that is psychoanalysis at some level often leads psychoanalysts to succumb to the fascination of biography. Clearly, Freud, while properly recognizing the difference between analyst and biographer, entered into such an endeavor more than once, although not without trepidation. In his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, Freud warned that to gratify the wish to idealize the person under study, biographers tend to "obliterate