Freud

Why did Freud turn to biography? For a number of reasons, some personal, some academic. He disliked pathography and hagiography both, and wrote his famous Leonardo book as a corrective to such misguided endeavors. It would not do, said Freud, either to demean one's subject or to idealize him. Freud also regarded lives as testing grounds for theoretical ideas. With Leonardo, for instance, he sought to fine-tune his thinking about subjects like sublimation and homosexuality. In fact, it is worth noting here that Freud dismissed experimental confirmation of his concepts, calling it unnecessary. All the support he needed came from case histories like those of Dora, the "Wolf Man," and "Little Hans," clinical evidence, his own autobiography, and the analysis of historical figures.

A few of the personal sources for Freud's interest in biography are adduced by Alan Elms in his outstanding chapter on Freud's Leonardo. It seems that, in writing of Leonardo, about whom precious little is known, Freud was also writing of himself. Though not acted on, Freud's sexual feelings for both Wilhelm Fliess, an early mentor, and Jung are well known. Consequently Leonardo is portrayed by Freud as "passively homosexual." For a complex of reasons Freud's sexual life with his wife came to an early end, one possible result being a re-channeling of erotism into work. Consequently Leonardo is depicted as a "perfect and rare" type of individual who from earliest infancy sublimated all desire, funneling it into art and scientific activity. A large body of research likewise finds evidence of identification in Freud's work on Moses, a book that "plagued him like a ghost not laid" (see Alexander, 133). Moses and Freud are both discoverers, but also "propagators and guardians of the law, recipients of important revelations" (Alexander, 135). Like Moses, Freud too can be seen as an authoritative, competent patriarch protecting something whose value he appreciated and fostered. In Moses and Monotheism Freud speculates that Moses was killed because of the hardships his ideas imposed on people who then disowned them, while a small set of followers remained faithful, at least in memory (Alexander, 145). Freud wrote this in 1934, five years before his death, so it comes as little surprise that fears about the fate of psychoanalysis found their way into his examination of another "Great Man."

Additional psychobiographical writings by Freud include "The Moses of Michelangelo," "Dostoevsky and Parricide," and "Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dr. Schreber)."

Of course, most of Freud’s life writing did not concern itself with historical figures. His subjects were closer at hand, and far better known to him. They were his patients. What one notices first about these "case histories," apart from their ocassionally excessive reductionism or their evident tendentiousness, is Freud’s style of rhetoric. He is anything but dogmatic. He anticipates incredulity, marches ahead with self-proclaimed hesitation, and pleads for the reader’s patience. He often seems almost apologetic (see, for example, the "Wolf Man" case, in which Freud repeatedly expects the reader's belief to "abandon" him). But this style’s effects–and it is a style not without influence–become in the long run salutary. The reader’s trust is paradoxically increased, and Freud’s conclusions meet with less skepticism than predicted. Clearly Freud knew what he was up to. His choice of style, hardly accidental, increased his arguments' persuasiveness.

Introducing a set of the most famous case studies, Philip Rieff (in Freud, 1996) points to what he considers Freud's supreme gift: offering an astonishingly clear yet sufficiently complex analysis of the world's most complicated thing--a human being. Rieff's is an important observation. It speaks to the artistic requirements for an effective biographical narrative. Freud succeeds where others fail precisely in combining historical, scientific, and literary approaches to human experience. Though he never tired of asserting the scientism of psychoanalysis, in his life writing Freud behaved like an artist. He juggled clarity and complexity, detail and generality, mystery and mundanity with a skill rivalling the novelist's.

In biography Freud's shadow clearly looms. The case is the same for autobiography. For those telling their own lives, psychoanalysis offers a ready-made superstructure, an implicit theory of self. At the very least, a kind of "tabloid Freud" snakes its way into numberless mass-market outpourings of identity. Confession seems to be that particular genre’s sin qua non, as if a life has not been adequately revealed unless some sordid memory gets uncovered or some sexual practice disclosed. Less absurdly, life–to some autobiographers--is the surreal Freudian dream we interpret or even "dream" through the act of writing. We don’t necessarily understand it, and we don’t even feel as though we authored it on occasion, but it must be made sense of if we seek self-liberation. Obviously, the Freudian metaphor runs deep. Evading its determining influence actually requires active effort. For if we feel like a "mystery unto ourselves," like a conflicted, warring "cast of characters," like a "jumbled grouping" of "infantile motives" straining towards adulthood, we do so because Freud pictured personality in just those terms; he invented the story forms so seemingly irresistible to life-writers. In fact, the fractured, split-up self of postmodernism now in vogue finds its source in psychoanalysis, a theory assuming self-division along with self-inscrutability.

The very doing of psychoanalysis requires autobiography. Freud was an assiduous autobiographer. He wrote his life story for a series entitled "Contemporary Medicine in Self-Portrayals," though that work’s aim was less autobiography than the tale of the birth of psychoanalysis (Freud, 1925-26). But Freud wrote letters, too, and through them left a clear impression of self. Especially revealing are those to Wilhelm Fliess and Jung. Both men Freud adored with an investment of admitted sexual energy, and both relationships fell into strained disrepair.

As for autobiography and the institution of psychoanalysis, dogma asserts that analysts must be analyzed before analyzing. And as Marcus notes, there is even a sense in which psychoanalysis itself is founded on autobiography. Freud "turned autobiography into science" (82). He was his own case study. In his life--his dreams, memories, and sexual history--he located psychological truths which seemed representative of human mental life in general. To Freud, the story of his life and the history of psychoanalysis were "intimately interwoven" (1925, 71). He writes, "Psychoanalysis came to be the whole content of my life. . . No personal experiences of mine are of any interest in comparison to my relations with that science" (71). Moreover, "I have been more open and frank in some of my writings (The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life) than people usually are who describe their lives for their contemporaries or for posterity" (73). Is psychoanalysis Freud's own life? Derrida asks, "How can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated self-analysis, give to a world wide institution its birth?" (quoted in Marcus, 82). Others wonder how a theory of the concealed nature of personality and the impossibility of autobiography could be derived from looking within. But then, all theory is covert autobiography. Like those to follow, Freud first hoped to understand himself. Indeed, the truly unifying theory of personality ought to account not only for 1) the life of the theorist, and 2) the phenomena to which other theories address themselves, but for 3) the other theories, as well. And as "each theory is the expression of the limits and biases of the theorist, . . . other persons' interest in and resonance to the theoretical ideas are equally strongly affected by subjective ideological factors" (Atwood & Tomkins, 1976, 167). We invent theories to understand ourselves and we gravitate to theories which seem to tell our story.

Life writers set off on a perilous path when they dismiss the colossal contributions of Freud. His work merits close and careful study. He invented psychobiography, he used the most nimble of theories to bring coherence to apparent chaos, he practiced an arresting narrative style, and he told very good stories about people. If, as fashion goes, a life is a story, then biographers must become storytellers, the more captivating, the better. In this Freud sets a standard well worth emulating.