On 31 May 1936 Professor Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, wrote a letter
to the Austrian littérateur Arnold Zweig, warning him about the dangers of undertaking
biographical research. Freud intoned that ‘anyone turning biographer commits himself to
lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own lack of
understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were it couldn't be
used’.
As a psychoanalyst, Freud knew only too well how readily each individual person
employs the ubiquitous mechanisms of defence such as repression, projection, splitting and
idealization, all of which operate to conceal our deepest, innermost affective states; and he
questioned therefore how accurately someone could write a life history. Freud harboured
other anxieties about the craft of biography. In his classic monograph on Leonardo da
Vinci, published in 1910, the great Viennese analyst not only lamented ‘the uncertainty and
fragmentary nature of the material relating to him which tradition makes available’, but
also questioned the very enterprise of psychologically informed biographical work itself.