ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL
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upon the essentialist biographical temptation in its second man–
ifestation, which can easily result in
Leben
without any
Form
and without any shadow of thought form. Personality portrai–
ture, which emerged historically as
the
biographical mode of the
years after the First World War, focused upon the tumultuous
and inchoate wishes that were the special interest of Sigmund
Freud. It is not an accident-as the Marxists say-that personal–
ity biography burgeoned in the 1920s, or that Virginia Woolf
praised its founding father, Lytton Strachey, for facing his emi–
nent Victorians as "an equal [who] preserves his freedom and his
right to independent judgment." They were not always received,
but lessons in the importance of independent judgment and self–
development were delivered constantly by that war and its after–
math. Self-analysis was the order of the day and, as Mark
Longaker observed in 1934, "the [then] present day reader most
often goes to biography because he is interested in himself."
Much the same remark could have been made of people who
went to biography
writing.
The precondition of personality portraiture is equality
with the subject. But this equality is not a given; it is what the
biography writing produces in those who do it well. For, regard–
less of his or her actual age, the biographer is young in relation
to the subject and must begin, in one or more of the possible lit–
eral or metaphorical ways, as a child. Thus there is bound to be
in the portraying an ingredient, large or small, of what Freud
called the "family romance." The ingredient has, it seems,
grown larger in the years between Virginia Woolf's manifesto
and our own moment. It has recently become fashionable for
biographers to present the "family romance" in their prefaces,
by offering little analyses of their relations to the subject and the
subject's place in their fantasies. The biographer's statement of
personal engagement signals that what will follow is an imme–
diate encounter, a biography that will read more like an ex–
tended interview than a history book, more like a journalist's
notebook than a critical study.
The "family romance" dimension of biography writing is
clearest when the biography is a work of recovery from misinter–
pretation or obscurity, for this kind of work combines easily
with a biographer's own search for identity, a room of his or her
own, freedom, and independent judgment. At the present mo-
