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“This Autobiographical Study shows how psycho-analysis came to be the whole content of my life and rightly assumes that no personal experiences of mine are of any interest in comparison to my relations with that science” (p. 181), states Freud in his 1935 postscript to his impersonal and misleadingly titled 1925 Autobiographical Study.
We laugh now at this erroneous assumption. Freud's decision not to write his own personal autobiography means that we have had to rely totally on his biographers to understand the man behind the great name. That a whole army of such biographers, eager to fill this gap, has scrutinized every aspect of Freud's personal and professional life seems to be the ironical consequence of his determination to protect his privacy (letter from Freud to Bernays, 10 August 1929, p. 295). Since devoted disciples as well as sworn enemies of psychoanalysis have been among these authors, Freud has been alternately depicted as capable of lofty and warm-hearted generosity or else possessed by a mean and revengeful spirit. Thus our thirst for more certainty about Freud's true character remains unquenched. In this book, some of our questions are answered.
“Father kept on his desk a kind of unbound diary in the form of large sheets of white paper upon which he recorded in a most laconic way those events of each day that seemed to him of importance,” (p. xi) explained his eldest son, my father, Martin Freud. In due time the diary was moved to London, along with Freud's other books and papers. Put in trust to the London Freud Museum, it was available to Freud researchers but has so far remained unpublished. I shall present the book's entire structure before discussing the two most important sections in greater detail.
Molnar's Introduction, which explains the circumstances in which the Diary was written and then published, its place and