ABSTRACT
255People like Freud have difficulty in preserving an incognito. To keep distinct the work and the personality of its creator seems impossible. In its instinctive desire to keep alive the former, the world strives through the medium of the personal to obtain a better grasp of the magnificence of Freud’s achievements and thus, as it were, to bring them down to its level. Such an attempt turns in part upon the testimony of witnesses, in part—particularly in the case of the biographers of the future—upon a process of reconstruction. Most biographers—as is the habit of the majority of them—will be swayed by some more or less unconscious bias of their own: through an effort at popularization, some will falsify both work and master by superficiality; with others, fear of the truth will produce a hostile interpretation; still others—and these are the most dangerous—will be moved by an excess of adoration to present a cult in place of keeping to reality.
