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PARTISAN REVIEW
of "the dream ofIrma's injection" in the second chapter of
The Inter–
pretation ofDreams
is a particularly good example, but there are many
others. In such texts the myth of the scientist and the scientific
achievement are substantially entwined.
Freud's revolutionary theory of the human personality and all
his writing from
The Interpretation
oj
Dreams
onward grew out of his
discovery of some basic things about his own personality. These
discoveries, made by 1900, are usually referred to as his "self–
analysis." Freud reported on this fragmentarily in his published
writings and in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess .
Freud never wrote a psychological profile of himself com–
parable to his case histories of patients like "Dora" or the "Wolf–
man . " On the contrary, his
Autobiographical Study
is one of the least
revealing documents of its kind. He did, however, weave
autobiographical hints into his other works in such a way as to pro–
voke speculation about his personal history. And in the
mythography of a genius, this impetus for the reader to speculate is
more important than the putative facts of the hero's life .
It is well known , of course, that Freud was a private person,
and reluctant to become the subject of a biography . Late in his life
he fended off requests of several would-be biographers . In his
remarks written for the acceptance of the Goethe Prize in 1930, he
impugned the value of biography as a genre . And in earlier years he
twice destroyed virtually all of his letters, diaries, and manuscripts.
These gestures were not simply attempts to guard his privacy. A let–
ter he wrote to his fiancee, Martha Bernays, in 1885, reveals other
intentions.
I have just carried out a resolution which one group of people ,
as yet unborn and fated to misfortune, will feel acutely .
. . . They are my biographers . I have destroyed all my diaries of
the past fourteen years, with letters, scientific notes and the
manuscripts of my publications.... I cannot leave [Vienna]
and cannot die before ridding myself of the disturbing thought of
who might come by the old papers . Besides, everything that fell
before the decisive break in my life, before our coming together
[his engagement to Martha Bernays] and my choice of a calling
[he had just decided to go to Paris to study with Charcot and
pursue the elusive disorder known as hysteria] , I have put
behind me . . .. Let the biographers chafe . We won't make it too
easy for them . Let each one of them believe he is right in his
