SOURCE: Weiland, Steven. “Psychoanalytic Biography: Lost Objects and Subversive Effects.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 2 (spring 1989): 270–82.

In the following review of Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's Anna Freud: A Biography and Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time, Weiland praises Gay for smoothly integrating biographical detail, historical context, and discussion of Freudian theory into a single narrative.

As a form of historical inquiry the primary goal of biography has been accuracy and the primary problem inclusiveness. The question for a biographer with a sure grasp of the facts is what principles of proportion should guide their use in a life history. The massive nineteenth-century biography lost favor because its great detail did not guarantee that its subject was convincingly represented. Hence the arts of biography—experiments in point of view and in narrative organization, for example—are now as highly valued as the scholarly habits needed to discover and assemble the record...