Not Him Again! Biographies and Histories of Freud on his 165th Birthday

This blog began a year ago yesterday, on Freud's birthday. I had hoped to have this entry finished to post yesterday, but it has been an utterly exhausting academic year and in the press to finish grading this week and many other things, I was not able to finish this post.

But finally here--if anyone finds them useful--are some thoughts on Freud and psychoanalysis, and some book recommendations. I start with historical context, and then look at some of the biographies.

All this reading began thirty years ago when my outstanding gr. 12 English teacher gave us a crash course in Freud and Jung which, she said, we needed before reading that year's required novels from Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy. (Davies, we discovered, clutters up his novels with all kinds of especially Jungian references to archetypes and such things.) Thus began my introduction to psychodynamic thought, which I have ever after found invaluable not just in my intellectual work but also now in my clinical practice. 

I never hide my "bias" for psychoanalytic thought, but neither do I try to force it on others, either, for nobody likes a crusading busybody, least of all me. One of the best lessons it has given me is to beware of anyone who becomes a zealous convert to, and thus hidebound ideological proponent of, a particular tradition of thought and practice to the exclusion and denigration of others. 

The fact, as Paul Roazen and others have shown, that the history of psychoanalysis is not immune to such temptations in nowise undermines this gift which, at its best, it continues to offer. Roazen, in fact, is a good place to start for his books are not just very important and revealing in their own right, but also, taken together, form one of the first and, in my view, still the best broad consideration of the many historiographical issues posed by studying, e.g., Freud and his Followers, a great book I read alongside Meeting Freud's Family. Both books were able to talk, sometimes with unprecedented access and freedom, to surviving members of Freud's family, his inner circle, and some of his patients as well as analytic colleagues in that first generation around him. 

Roazen is also useful in his Freud: Political and Social Thought. Finally, in addition to the above-linked book on historiography, see also Roazen's fascinating Encountering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis.

Historical Context:

Roazen's work can usefully be situated in a still-wider historical context, and two books do that extremely well. Both recognize that psychoanalysis did not develop in a vacuum, but instead in a particular context and moment which--as has been frequently noted--seems, in Freud's hands, to have been seen as a full-throated fin de siècle embrace of Enlightenment ideals about the triumph of "reason" over something called "religion" and other disordered human passions. 

Two very good books give this historical context and a very good critical analysis: the first is George Makari, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (Harper, 2008). He concentrates his focus on Vienna, but also moves outward as psychoanalysis expands into other centres such as Berlin and Budapest, and then London, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere.  

The second is Eli Zaretsky's Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. (Zaretsky's more recent Political Freud: A History should also be consulted.) Here as elsewhere Zaretsky is an important historian of the political left and of the depredations of capitalism. In both of his books, he is aware of and gives greater emphasis than Makari does to the socially radical consequences of psychoanalytic thought (well captured in Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 by Elizabeth Ann Danto) before it became captured by the North American medical establishment and bourgeoisie. 

More recently, we have Daniel José Gaztambide's exhilarating new book A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: from Freud to Liberation Psychology (Lexington, 2019). I interviewed him about this book at length here. I am happy to note that effective next week, his publisher is bringing out an affordable paperback edition of his book, so now you have no excuse not to order it!

Biography: 

It has become something of a commonplace that the first "authorized" biography of Freud, the three-volume effort by Ernest Jones (on whom see Brenda Maddox's fascinating and often amusing book Freud's Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis), traffics too much in hagiography. But when I found a used copy two summers ago and read it, I found that it was more critical in places than I was expecting. Jones was capable of taking more distance from his subject than many have suggested--even if, indubitably, he was also extremely anxious about and solicitous for the protection of Freud's family and reputation, which caused him to ignore or severely downplay some things. 

Peter Gay's biography, which I read as an undergraduate, has also been accused of being hagiographic. But it is still a well-researched and well-written biography by a first-rate historian (Gay held an endowed chair at Yale): Freud: A Life for Our Time. I would also recommend Gay's much shorter book Freud for Historians. 

I have read just about every book written by Adam Phillips and been deeply influenced by him. His mini-biography, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst is very good, but by design it only goes up to his fiftieth birthday in 1906.

For a full biography--and arguably the best one-volume treatment--I have referred people to Elisabeth Roudinesco Freud: In His Time and Ours. I would also recommend Roudinesco’s short but powerful book Why Psychoanalysis?