ABSTRACT
The more one examines the relationship between psychoanalysis and biography, the greater the complexities appear. A poor psychoanalytic study can be as superficial as the “mythic” biography when it merely catalogues a list of instinctual urges, asserts the presence of an Oedipus complex, or reduces a whole life to a single formula such as the subject’s need for punishment. This chapter discusses the autobiography of Augustine and the psychoanalytic biographical study by Charles Kligerman. Kligerman describes the Confessions as an exhaustive study of the self, and, using his clinical training, observes that the text has the spontaneous quality of free association. The “archaeological” fascination of psychoanalysis with the “forgotten past” of the individual and with the influence on mental life of the “deepest strata” of the unconscious is not the principal barrier to the augmentation of traditional biography by its new insights.
