ABSTRACT
L'Age d'homme' was Leiris's first sustained attempt in the genre to which he has most richly contributed and in which he must be accounted one of the most outstanding innovators: autobiography. Leiris's subliminal recognition is seems to liberate him from the constriction that he has previously been feeling in trying to apologize for the book, and the rest of the essay consists of an extended meditation on the aims and achievements of the book. For the writing of an autobiographical work of art requires the author to be at once both subject and object of his enterprise and can never entirely escape the charge that almost every autobiography since Rousseau has had to face: that it is an exercise in self-love. Finally Leiris says of psychoanalytic therapy: It is in this belief that Leiris has felt justified in allowing his book to unfold without being subject to any apparent constraints, whether in regard to form or in regard to content.
