Subject to Biography

In this provocative book, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl illuminates the psychological and intellectual demands that 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 among self-knowledge, autobiography, biography, and cultural history. She considers what remains valuable in Sigmund Freud's work, and which areas - theory of character, for instance - must be rethought to be useful for current psychoanalytic work, for feminist studies, and for social theory.