Becoming Freud: The Making of Psychoanalysis

Renowned psychoanalyst Phillips (One Way and Another) conjures up a vibrant portrait of Sigmund Freud, examining psychiatry's most famous figure as it contends with the difficulties of placing his life in biographic form. In contrast to the more popular focus on an older Freud, Phillips introduces us to a younger version: the eldest son of Jewish immigrants, gifted but troubled by childhood trauma, whose future ideas were founded upon these aspects of his upbringing. And so the emergence of psychoanalysis comes at the end of this story, implying that the widely influential school of thought is merely one aspect of Freud's larger story. The book's brevity speaks, perhaps, to the ways in which Freud's life resists complete documentation; in fact, biography represents the very type of reshaped and repurposed story of the past that Freud so famously attributed to dreams. Phillips's perspective, then, becomes openly interpretive, taken not as historical fact but rather as exploratory speculation of the very blatant ambiguities surrounding Freud's life. Much like psychoanalysis itself, this book does not seek to claim and advance any singular sense of truth; instead, it encourages us to relish in the illuminations, indeed the very uncertainties of the process. As such, it's a biography that might even have received the approval of Freud himself. (June)