The problem posed to the biographer by the life and work of Freud, and by all that has been archived under that name for a century, has no precedent in history. Everything that constitutes the data of a biography: memory, testimony, the archive, the conditions of its storage, the sites of conservation in handwritten or printed traces and above all in the vestiges of an individual, transindividual and transgenerational psychic writing, will have been the very object of what Freud has called psychoanalysis.
Since then, whoever speaks of Freud, whether he wants it or not, whether he knows it or not, expresses himself through those marks left on him, on his culture, on his way of thinking, on his style, by the traces of the suspension of man's sense of self-consciousness for centuries. of their history, of their beliefs, of their destiny. But not only that: the involvement of the biographer and his desire in the space that he could aspire to objectify about the history of a life that is not his own, of a life so intimately linked to the object of his discoveries, cannot but reflect the way in which memory is structured, implemented, determined for himself, having in turn become a place of archive, left to its own oblivions, rearrangements and displacements. Moreover, the Freudian project, in its realization, transforms the very status of the historian's object, his methods of reading and deciphering, his conception of "historical truth."