Thirty years ago, when I was but twenty, I read a book that—quite literally—changed my life. It was Paul Roazen’s Brother Animal (1986). During the previous two years, I had struggled with a series of books by and about Freud, C.G. Jung, the Glover brothers, Erich Fromm, and Erik Erikson. The impressions I had gleaned of Freud’s personality from these disparate sources did not create a clear or consistent impression. Freud doubtlessly was a major thinker of the twentieth century, but Freud the man was a mystery to me, rendered all the more elusive by the dense controversies that swirled around him.
Daniel Burston (Sat,) studied this question.