Telling Freud's Story

Abstract

The figure of Sigmund Freud haunts the modern consciousness, but popular culture too often reduces Freud to a simplistic set of concepts or a figure of fun. The popular image of Freud is a reduction, a caricature – a fiction. The fictionalization of Freud is hardly a new development, however: the first person to fictionalize Freud was Freud himself. In writings such as The Interpretation of Dreams and the Dora case, Freud tells his own story, as well as the stories of his developing theory of psychoanalysis and his patient Ida Bauer. Writers like Hélène Cixous continue in Freud's own tradition as they probe Freud's unconscious mind and challenge his public persona, creating a portrait of Freud that is not a reductive caricature, but a thoughtful meditation on his personality and ideas. The following paper examines the ways that telling Freud's story can be meaningful and fruitful. Exploring the fictionalization of Freud suggests that any attempt to turn a real person into a text is in some sense a fictionalization and that this process is an essential part of the way that human beings understand others and the self.