The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud

The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud is a biography of Sigmund Freud by Ernest Jones, originally published in three volumes (first volume 1953, second volume 1955, third volume 1957), and subsequently in a one-volume edition abridged by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus in 1961.

Scholarly reception

Psychologist Hans Eysenck, writing in his Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985), calls The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud the "most famous" of those biographies of Freud that have become well known. However, he sees it as "more a mythology than a history, leaving out as it does nearly all the warts and making many alterations to the portrait by suppressing data and items which might reflect unfavourably on Freud."^[1] Historian Peter Gay, in his Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), writes that The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud remains "the classic biography of Freud" and "contains many astute judgments" despite its flaws, among which he includes Jones's graceless style and tendency to "separate the man and the work." Gay sees the most serious charge against Jones as being "malice against other followers of Freud, a supposedly unconquerable jealousy that led him to be scathing about such rivals as Ferenczi." Gay believes that, "There is something in this criticism, but less than is commonly thought...Jones's final verdict on Ferenczi, which heavily hints that in his last years Ferenczi was subject to psychotic episodes, and to which strong exception has been taken, largely echoes the opinion that Freud expressed in an unpublished letter to Jones."^[2]

References