ABSTRACT
The other day, a patient of mine, who is a psychoanalyst, came in and told me, excitedly, apprehensively, that she had just come from a session with a patient of hers who was furious with me. Her patient had been reading my biography of Anna Freud, and had concluded that I had wilfully concealed Anna Freud’s lesbianism. “What do you think?” my patient demanded of me. “Is she right?” When I questioned her question, my patient and I went off in the direction of her attitude towards me at the moment, which was suspicion and fear for the fate of her usual idealisation of me: maybe, she was thinking, I was homophobic and I would reject her for her own lesbianism. The question of Anna Freud’s alleged lesbianism receded from our work while we focused on the homophobia my patient feared in me, but my biography remained there, suspended in the matrix of our talk, having an episode in the life it has had since its first appearance back in 1988. Every biography could be a subject of biography. And a biography’s life is, also, part of the afterlife of its subject—part of the subject’s public self, or publicly created self.
