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Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Writing Women's Lives. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 282p. Megan Simpson University of Texas of the Permian Basin Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's third collection oftheoretical essays offers consistently fresh perspectives on a surprisingly wide range oftopics, from biography writing to anorexia nervosa. The first of the book's two major parts, "The Practice of Psychobiography," is comprised of essays exploring the process, practice, and dieory ofbiography writing, essays informed byYoung-Bruehl's experiences writing her acclaimed biographies ofAnna Freud and Hannah Arendt. In the second part, "Feminism and Psychoanalysis," Young-Bruehl explores the vexed relationship between the two schools of thought as she treats key issues oftheir mutual concern. What unifies these two otherwise quite dissimilar sets ofwritings are the revealing intersections among psychoanalysis, feminism, and biography diat inform and define Young-Bruehl's project throughout the volume. Not only biographers, but also those who read biographies, and wish to do so from a theoretically informed perspective, will find the essays in Part 1 illuminating . Young-Bruehl is sensitive to the postmodernist perception diat biography is a hopelessly untheorized and essentialist activity. And, although die-hard postmodernists will probably not find enough in Young-Bruehl's work to acquit biography and its practitioners ofsuch charges, her first two chapters do go a long way toward offering a theoretical framework for biographical scholarship that bodi relieves it from the necessity ofclaiming scientific objectivity and informs it with original psychoanalytical insights. In "The Biographer's Empathy with Her Subject ," Young-Bruehl considers the role ofthe biographer's subjeciviry and her relationship to her subject, celebrating the cultivation of a kind of empadiy she describes as "putting another inyourself, becoming another person's habitat" (22), a kind of cohabitation diat, if undertaken with care, can lead to important selfdiscovery for the biographer herself(who is, as such, subject to biography). In "Psychoanalytic Reflections on Creativity," the only chapter that deals with literary authors (including Yeats, Wilde, Hopkins, and Stein), Young-Bruehl presents her theory of "the character-ideal" that creative people form for themselves in late adolescence as a kind of guiding image or figure diat organizes the sense of self and the particular direction diat the creative process will take. While this — a continuation ofthe main dirust ofone ofYoung-Bruehl's earlier collections oftheoretical essays, Creative Characters (Harvard, 1991) — is an original and intriguing idea, I am made uneasy by the very structuralist impulse MO * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW H- FALL 1999 that guides it, resulting in three rigidly fixed types into which all people's characters and their character-ideals can be placed: narcissistic, obsessional, and hysterical . Indeed, Young-Bruehl's propensity for classification in general, though it does in places help make her material manageable for readers, is also the single most disturbing aspect ofthe book. Especially evident throughout the essays collected in Part 1 is the uncanny tendency for things to fall into exactly three groups or types: from the three character types already mentioned to three modes of biographical empathy, to "three methodological roads [that] have appeared and been considered" in the "joint development ofpsychoanalysis and biography" (87), to three reasons "why psychoanalysis is unique among the sciences" (102), to three interrelated themes in the work of Hannah Arendt that have attracted the attention of three generations of feminists, respectively — to name a few. One is left with the impression that these categories are arbitrary or imposed, and in either case cannot be taken seriously. This tripártate thinking seems to ease up a bit in the essays that comprise Part 2. This is also, coincidentally, where the strongest pieces in the book are found. Especially provocative are Young-Bruehl's rereadings ofFreud and the conclusions she comes to on a variety oftopics. In "Rereading Freud on Female Development," a fascinating exercise in historical-biographical reconstruction (163), she does something Freud himself did not but might have: she uses his later work on female pre-Oedipal mother attachment to revise his early theories of female psychology for which he has been so severely criticized by both psychoanalysts and feminists and widi which the laterwork is inconsistent. This analysis leads...

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