"Autobiographical Study, An"

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"AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STUDY, AN"

Freud's autobiography appeared in Die Medizin der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen (Today's medicine: autobiographies), published in Leipzig in 1925. In the introduction Freud recalls that in 1909 he had outlined the development of psychoanalysis at Clark University in Massachusetts and in 1914 published a history of the psychoanalytic movement (1914d). Realizing that his life history is part of the origins of psychoanalysis, Freud wrote, "I will have to try to find a new way of blending subjective and objective exposition, somewhere between biography and history."

After a brief reference to his childhood, he directs his attention to a discussion of his teachers: Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, Theodor Meynert, and especially Jean Martin Charcot. Considerable space is given to Josef Breuer and hypnosis, relatively little to Wilhelm Fliess. The major discoveries—the concept of psychic reality, infantile sexuality, resistance, repression, dream interpretation—are described and condensed so he can focus on a discussion of psychoanalysis's relationship with other fields and, therefore, the history of the psychoanalytic movement and its conflicts (including his with Carl Gustav Jung). The end of the book is devoted to the applications of psychoanalysis: religion, ethnology, mythology, pedagogy, and so on, illustrating the importance Freud gave to this aspect of his theory.

The identification of Freud with psychoanalysis limits the field of historical investigation in terms of both Freud's biography and the history of psychoanalysis. However, this method of personal exposition is familiar to him and is, in the majority of his works, an intrinsic part of the theoretical exposition, if not an apodictic strategy. Following his break with Wilhelm Fliess, Freud was cautious about the charge of plagiarism and priority of discovery. It is possible to conclude that this point of view limits an understanding of the dialectics of influence, the recognition of cryptomnesia, and more generally the reliance on another's hypotheses to advance one's own.

The truth, as Freud wrote, is fragmentary, and historical narrative is more like a legend than a "family romance."

Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor

See also: Autobiography.

Source Citation

Freud, Sigmund. (1925d [1924]). Selbstdarstellung. Die Medizin der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, 4, Leipzig, p. 1-52; GW, 14: 31-96; An autobiographical study. SE, 20: 7-70.