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In this study of Freud's self-analysis the French analyst Didier Anzieu has produced a work of monumental scholarship. Originally a much slimmer volume published in 1959, Anzieu elaborated and expanded the material for some fifteen years, through research by himself, students and colleagues. It will certainly remain the definitive presentation of the topic for a long time.
As a result of the work of Anzieu and others, Freud has become by now the most analyzed man in history. In his early years he evidently had a great need to reveal himself, and he did so as none other before him in The Interpretation of Dreams. This book thus became an original kind of autobiography. It remains one of the major intellectual documents of Western civilization, a quantum jump over everything ever seen before in this area.
Freud's self-analysis went on in a somewhat formal manner from 1895 to 1902. To unravel all its complexities required a detailed knowledge not only of all his dreams, but also of the personal revelations in the Letters to Fliess, and much other material uncovered by others, such as the Bernfelds' meticulous reexamination of Freud's progress through school. In spite of the excellence of his biography, Jones did not attempt to recapitulate the inner Odyssey of the founder of psychoanalysis in any elaborate detail. He devoted only seven pages to the topic in Vol. 1 of the biography. While he did sketch the broad picture accurately enough, most of the detail, much of which only came to light after Jones' work was published, is absent. With Anzieu's extraordinary work it is now all there. It is doubtful whether anything essentially new about Freud's inner life in the years before 1900 will ever be uncovered.
The raw material with which Anzieu deals consists of 50 dreams, and 47 childhood memories, including a few Freudian slips (parapraxes). Using the available publications, Anzieu has succeeded in dating 45 of the 50 dreams and all of the childhood memories and parapraxes.