Subject to Biography

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl...reveals, with precision and candor, how she has brought her philosophical and psychoanalytic knowledge to the biographical task...she writes with unfailing awareness of the need to make herself intelligible and agreeable to the informed public. -- Paul Robinson Stanford University In these engrossing reflections, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl expands our vision of the work of the past as well as of the work that is to come. Wide-ranging and insightful, Subject to Biography is also a pleasure to read. -- Jessica Benjamin author of The Bonds of Love A mature, thoughtful, and scholarly work, reflecting and embodying the experience of sustained research. With a distinctive voice and an equally distinctive capacity to take that one extra mental, reflexive step that deepens the material being presented, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl gives us complex, multidimentional perspectives on biography, psychoanalysis and feminism. It is a genuine pleasure to read her. -- Victor Wolfenstein, University of California, Los Angeles; Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute

Young-Bruehl here reflects on the relations between self-knowledge, autobiography, biography, and cultural history. She considers what remains valuable in Sigmund Freud’s work, and what areas—theory of character, for instance—must be rethought to be useful for current psychoanalytic work, for feminist studies, and for social theory.

In this provocative new book, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl illuminates the psychological and intellectual demands writing biography makes on the biographer and explores the complex and frequently conflicted relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis.

A practicing psychoanalyst, a distinguished scholar, and the widely praised biographer of Anna Freud and Hannah Arendt, Young-Bruehl here reflects on the relations between self-knowledge, autobiography, biography, and cultural history. She considers what remains valuable in Sigmund Freud's work, and what areas--theory of character, for instance--must be rethought to be useful for current psychoanalytic work, for feminist studies, and for social theory.

Psychoanalytic theory used for biography, she argues, can yield insights for psychoanalysis itself, particularly in the understanding of creativity. Subject to Biography offers not simply the products of an astute mind, but an entrée into the thinking process; it welcomes the reader into the writer's workshop.