Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Jewish Lives Series), by Adam Phillips, New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2014,  178 pp., $25.00 (hard-bound)

It takes chutzpah to write a biography about Sigmund Freud, and Adam Phillips knows it. For one, as the young Freud-29 years and full of heroic audacity-wrote his fiancée Martha Bernays in 1885:

One intention, as a matter of fact, I have almost finished carrying out, an intention which a number of as yet unborn and unfortunate people will one day resent. Since you won't guess what kind of people I am referring to, I will tell you at once: they are my biographers. I have destroyed all my notes of the past fourteen years, as well as letters, scientific excerpts and the manuscripts of my papers … I couldn't have matured or died without worrying about who would get hold of those old papers … As for the biographers, let them worry, we have no desire to make it too easy for them. Each one of them will be right in his opinion of “The Development of the Hero,” and I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray. (p. 25)

“Let them worry” and “go astray” and feel themselves “right in his opinion:” We have been warned. But there is an even more daunting and subtle hazard for a biographer: As Freud knew, and as we analysts know, every biography is always already a deception. And so here's Phillips warning us again-and himself-about his undertaking:

So one of the first casualties of psychoanalysis, once the facts of our lives are seen as complicated in the Freudian way, is the traditional biography. After psychoanalysis all our narratives of the past-indeed, all our coherence and plausibility-are suspect. They hide more than they seek. History begins to sound like fiction, and fiction begins to sound peculiarly wishful. (p. 6)

History then is a fiction, and this is so because we only have memories of memories and constructions of constructions. That is, we are always constructing and reconstructing our past anew-there is no untouched archive of memory; the recollected past is a rewritten past. Indeed, active construction is ubiquitous even for experience we label “present” exp