Freud, an Intellectual Biography

The world of Freud biographies and biographical commentaries has become an increasingly complex, and at times disturbing one. Their authors have been variously characterized under headings from hagiographers to bashers. There theses have been taken as fighting words often enough to lead to coinages such as “Freud wars.” They see their subject in a number of often incompatible ways: founding genius, deceiving fraud, last of the 18th century Enlightenment philosophes, creative thinker derailed and deluded by Oedipal and patriarchal notions, godless Jew, and philosopher of death. Whether this confusion of tongues is best characterized as a war, or a newly developing form of academic discourse, it might bring to mind Freud’s skepticism about biography, as it did for Adam Phillips in his recent biographical account, Becoming Freud: the Making of a Psychoanalyst. Phillips discusses Freud‘s contention that biography is impossible. He elaborates, “psychoanalysis would one day be Freud‘s proof that biography is the worst kind of fiction, that biography is what we suffer from, that we need to cure ourselves of the wish for biography, and our belief in it. We should not be substituting the truth of our desire with trumped up life stories, stories that we publicize. It is, in other words, about biography that the young Freud (and the old) protests too much.”† Joel Whitebook connects Freud‘s skepticism about biography with problems of idealization, and suggests that with the help of recent contributions on idealization, such as those of Heinz Kohut, a more balanced approach to biography may be feasible. Whitebook hopes with the work I will consider here, Freud, An Intellectual Biography, to make a contribution to moving the recent problematic discussion of the matter, with its idealizations and the contrary, to higher ground, beyond the bellicosities that stifle productive discourse, toward more synthetic considerations of seemingly irreconcilable positions.

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