Freud as Leonardo

Abstract In One Of My first public appearances as a psychobiographer, I filled in for Erik Erikson. A Freud scholar named Herbert Lehmann was scheduled to speak at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute on one of Freud’s dreams. Erikson had reanalyzed Freud’s most thoroughly analyzed dream in a classic paper,1 so he had been asked to serve as the official discussant following Lehmann’s talk. When Erikson canceled because of illness, the search began for a substitute. I wasn’t an analyst and had visited the Institute only once or twice, but I had written about the same Freud dream that Erikson had reanalyzed. A friend who’s a training analyst at the Institute proposed that I take Erikson’s place. I felt like a member of the chorus who goes on for the ailing diva.