ABSTRACT
In an essay written in 1930, the great German writer Hermann Hesse spoke strongly against the abuse of psychoanalytic insights by literary critics, and protested, with trenchant irony, against the attempt to explain the personality of an author by the psychoanalytic investigation of his works. The Sterbas, for example, may be said to analyze resistances against psychoanalytic biography by contrasting the idealizing distortions of earlier biographers with their own striving for psychological truth. In distinguishing their own efforts from the idealizations of the nonanalytic biographers, the Sterbas state: "Our presentation differs in essential respects from that of the usual Beethoven biographers. Psychoanalysis has, of course, undergone significant developments since that time, some of the most far-reaching of which were introduced in Freud's own work. The Sterbas' Beethoven and His Nephew may thus be considered an excellent example of one kind of application of psychoanalysis to the biographical data of a great man.
