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The essayist Adam Phillips (1994) noted recently:
Instead of trying to discover facts about Freud's life that will finally validate or invalidate psychoanalysis, we should figure out what he was trying to do, how he came to do it—and what he didn't realize he was doing—in order to work out whether we think psychoanalysis is worth having; whether it produces the kind of life stories we go for. Proving that Freud did not always behave well is not the best way of doing this. (pp. 151-152).
That could be a comment on the entire recent “Freud wars.” In fact, it is part of Phillips's highly critical review of Phyllis Grosskurth's The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis. But certainly part of what Freud was “trying to do” was what he in fact did, in particular, what he did as a therapist. Paul Roazen's new book addresses that issue. The more important question of whether psychoanalysis produces “the kind of life stories we go for” is not the subject here.
There are numerous problems in knowing what Freud was like as