Freud’s disciples between biography and autobiography. Towards a collective history of the psychoanalytic movement

Abstract

The article explores the auto/biographical narratives devoted to Freud written by his disciples. The author argues that both biography and autobiography were important life-writing genres used by psychoanalysts in the first half of the twentieth century to express their subjective views on the history of the psychoanalytic movement. The chosen biographies of Freud shed light on the close relationship between “subjective” autobiographical discourse (based on self-observation and auto-analysis) and the “objective” role of a biographer. The author argues that the early auto/ biographies of Freud’s disciples presented a different history of psychoanalytic knowledge, where the collective thinking and affective relationships are shown to be crucial in the development of the psychoanalytic movement.

Keywords

• psychoanalysis
• life-writing
• Fritz Wittels
• Isidor Sadger
• Helene Deutsch