Chapter XVI. Character and Personality

I had hoped that from the innumerable details narrated in Volume I of this Biography a definite figure would emerge. Not all the reviewers of the book, however, found this to be so, and I therefore feel it incumbent on me to attempt a full-length sketch of Freud as a man—his personality, character and mode of life; the last of these was described in the preceding chapter. In doing so one immediately encounters the biographer's characteristic dilemma in drawing a portrait of a great man. On the one hand he may put his greatness and the superbness of his virtues in the foreground, which has the effect of making him unrecognizable as a human being and risking the reader's turning away in boredom from such a just Aristides. On the other hand if the foreground is occupied by the features betraying an incomplete harmony of character, the foibles and weaknesses inseparable from humanity, the result may be simply a caricature of a personage, one possibly provoking among unsympathetic readers disdain or even in the worst case derision. Yet no one knew better than Freud that what makes one man distinguishable from his fellows is not a catalogue of his surpassing qualities, which can produce a quite colourless picture, but the peculiarities that go to make up a distinctive character, including even such eccentricities that border on the neurotic. Speaking of the way in which the tendency of many biographers to idealize their subject blurs the outlines of the personality and creates a cold effect he wrote: ‘This is regrettable, since in doing so they sacrifice the truth to an illusion and forego the opportunity of penetrating into the most fascinating secrets of human nature.’1 In other words, individuality resides in the combination of the harmoniously fused elements of a personality with those features that imply a less perfect fusion.

Freud's case well illustrates this thesis. He was the soul of honour and never deviated from the highest standards of ethical behaviour in his