Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst

by Adam Phillips,
Psychology Today, May 12, 2014

Although he wrote speculative accounts about the lives of Moses, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Leonardo da Vinci, Sigmund Freud had an intense aversion to biography. "To be a biographer," he wrote in 1936, "you must tie yourself up in lies, concealments, hypocrisies, false colorings, and even in hiding a lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and if it were to be had we could not use it…"