A Freud comment, accepting a prize in honor of Goethe, and responding to the general academic hostility towards psychoanalysis, not least of all from historical biograhers, with some psychoanalysis--
"All the same, we may admit that there is still another motive force at work. The biographer's justification also contains a confession. It is true the biographer does not want to depose his hero, but he does want to bring him nearer to us. That means, however, reducing the distance that separates him from us: it still tends in effect towards degradation. And it is unavoidable if we learn more about a great man's life we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we, has in fact come near to us as a human being. Nevertheless, I think we may declare the efforts of biography to be legitimate. Our attitude to fathers and teachers is, after all, an ambivalent one since our reverence for them regularly conceals a component of hostile rebellion."
--Sigmund Freud, 1930
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