Freud: In His Time and Ours by Élisabeth Roudinesco (review)

The first question that a new biographer of Sigmund Freud must answer is why. Why would one write a biography of Freud despite the existence of more than thirty of them, including an exhaustive three-volume chronicle by Ernest Jones (1953) and the definitive version written by Peter Gay (1988)? Elisabeth Roudinesco confronts this question right at the beginning of her work. Her answer is that she not only has access to new details but also has a perspective that clarifies Freud's contribution while resisting the hagiographic impulse that dominates Jones's account and others.

Roudinesco recounts that she hesitated before taking on the project, but that in part the situation in France drove her onward. She writes, "The opening of the archives and access to the entire set of yet unmined documents made [my] approach possible, and the task was encouraged by the fact that no French historian had yet ventured on the terrain, which had long been dominated by first-rate research in English" (p. 3). In France, even more than in the Anglophone world, Freud's reputation desperately needed a revaluation, thanks to Michel Onfray's popular diatribe against Freud in 2010, Le Crépuscule d'une idole (The Twilight of an Idol) and the earlier attack on Freudian psychoanalysis in general put together in 2005 by Catherine Meyer, Le Livre noir de la psychanalyse (The Black Book of Psychoanalysis).

In response to this climate in France and to a lesser extent around the world, Roudinesco's book represents an effort to set the record straight. Though she is a clear partisan of Freud and psychoanalysis, Roudinesco, much to her credit, includes several unfavorable details about Freud, including his need to turn close friends into enemies, his belief in a government led by an aristocracy of sages, and his severe underestimation of Nazism. She also does not sidestep the fact that Freud based so much of his reading of Leonardo da Vinci on a mistranslation of the Italian word nibio that led him to talk about vultures without any warrant. Roudinesco willingly admits that some of Freud's works, like The Future of an Illusion, are just failures. Though Roudinesco is responding to Freud's detractors in this book, she does not simply take on the role of an apologist—and this gives the biography a lasting value.

Unlike Peter Gay, Roudinesco does not provide a systematic interpretation of all Freud's key texts. She is not attempting here to replace Gay's biography by matching his approach. Even Freud's most important book, The Interpretation of Dreams, does not receive an extended analysis, nor does Roudinesco point out Freud's own belief that this was his great work. What's more, she barely mentions such pivotal works as Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and Civilization and Its Discontents. On the other hand, the case studies and what became of these patients loom large in her account.

One finds out a great deal of information about the fate of the Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff), Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim), and the Rat Man (Ernest Lanzer). Roudinesco includes this information to clear the air of the myths surrounding the eventual fate of the most famous psychoanalytic patients, since the clinic is one of the sites where the opponents of psychoanalysis have made the most noise. Her account provides facts for those who wish to defend Freud's clinical approach and his attitude toward patients against this onslaught.

But if one is looking for an interpretation of Freud's basic project, one has come to the wrong place. This is a biography of Freud for those who are already well acquainted with his major works and are looking to fill in their knowledge of what happened behind the scenes in Freud's life and in the history of psychoanalysis. Roudinesco's book is most helpful as an instrument of debunking. She debunks both popular myths that surround Freud and those fostered...