ABSTRACT
Transference reactions associated with reading biographical materials are bound to be common. In contrast to the transference reactions of the professional historian engaged in writing a biography, however, they are transient and superficial. The scholar’s transference reactions to reading material often appear as avoidances. Henry Adams did not write the Education for his contemporaries, but for an audience a century later: it is we who are his intended readers. Psychoanalysis is disengaging itself from the mechanistic, energistic theories with which it was first associated by its founder and is reexamining its relationship to the physical sciences. The psychoanalyst constantly searches for meanings, whose multiplicity defies previous efforts to unify them under one or another schema. Adams accurately predicted that man’s concern about the limitations of his knowledge would dominate the intellectual world of the twentieth century.
