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Almost from the first, we are told of Freud's demeaning view of biographies and biographers; and recurrently, Adam Phillips reminds us of it. For however knowledgeable or scrupulous about sources a biographer may be, he cannot know a person's inner experience from moment to moment. How, then, could he write truthfully of a person's lived life? Young Dr. Freud wanted none such for himself, confessing in a letter to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, that he had destroyed all his notes and manuscripts of the previous fourteen years so that no biographers could misrepresent the sources of the heroic future he aspired to. Indeed, when, decades later, Arnold Zweig offered to write his biography, he tartly refused: “To be a biographer, you must tie yourself up in lies, concealments, hypocrisies, false colourings, and even in hiding a lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had” (Freud quoted by Phillips, p. 22).
Nonetheless, we are alerted to young Freud's assumption that more than one biographer would be interested. Also, respectful but otherwise not commenting on Jones's and Gay's magisterial works, Phillips writes—and invites us to read—a subtle and intriguing new biography, Becoming Freud, structured inevitably by the informing irony of Freud's conviction of its impossibility. A challenge seems to have been taken up.
Phillips presents the founder of psychoanalysis through mid-career only, inclusive of Studies on Hysteria (with ), The Interpretation