Deeply fascinated by the world of madness and the uncanny, Freud was equally committed to his lifelong project of rational systematisation, vainly hoping thereby to master and subdue it. Here lies the reason for his dalliance with Fleiss and his life-long pre-occupation with the paranormal. And here too is Roudinesco’s shaken kaleidoscope, as referred to by Keegan above. Consciously seeing himself as an Enlightenment hero invoking the rational and the scientific, he continually decentred and unsettled his own theorising, almost against his will. In the end, he could not help himself. As we all do, he had finally to concede victory to the unconscious. Though we cannot learn anything about being an analyst directly from a biography of Freud, perhaps we can at least take comfort in his failure. In this sense, there are no masters in psychoanalysis.
References
Keegan, P. (2017). From Shtetl to Boulevard. London Review of Books 39 (19): 5-12.
Whitebook, J. (2017). Freud: an Intellectual Biography. Cambridge University Press.