Volume 27, Number 15 · October 9, 1980
The Scar of Sigmund Freud
By Edward Rothstein
Freud: The Man and the Cause
by Ronald W. Clark
Random House, 652 pp., $19.95
Sigmund Freud's Dreams
by Alexander Grinstein
International Universities Press, 486 pp., $22.50
'Biographical truth,' Freud wrote to Arnold Zweig, 'is not to be had.' The truth of a life, he seemed to imply, would always slip away under the biographer's gaze, for where is such truth embodied and how is it confirmed? It can hardly be captured by cataloguing the meals eaten, the homes inhabited, the beliefs and constructions of the intellect, or the reports from colleagues, friends, passers-by. Moreover, the biographer is bound up in the truth he finds. Freud warned Zweig against writing an account of his life: 'Anyone turning biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own lack of understanding.' In his own biographical essay on Leonardo da Vinci (a 'fiction,' he called it) he writes, 'Biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special way.' They idealize or degrade—not only their subject but themselves. The biography, Freud implied elsewhere, may contain all the conflicts and confusions of an analytic session.
Review, 6498 words
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