Although the biography has retained its status as a classic, Jones has been criticized for presenting an overly favorable image of Freud.

Subjects addressed include Freud's relationship with the physiologist Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, and with the psychoanalysts Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank.

[1] According to the philosopher Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and the psychologist Sonu Shamdasani, the events leading to the writing of The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud occurred as follows.

Leon Shimkin, director of Simon & Schuster, contacted Jones in October 1946, to ask whether he was interested in writing a biography of Freud.

Consequently, Anna Freud was unsure how much she could trust Jones, and suggested that he collaborate with her friend the psychologist Siegfried Bernfeld.

Jones questioned Bernfeld on numerous matters, including Freud's date of birth, his essay on 'Screen memories', and his relations with the philosopher Franz Brentano and the psychiatrist Theodor Meynert.

According to Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud was acclaimed, and sales exceeded expectations, with 15,000 copies being sold in the first two weeks after publication in New York City alone.

They state that the work was reviewed in periodicals such as the Manchester Guardian, which wrote that Jones had "drawn the portrait of a man who deserves to be acclaimed, by general consent, among the greatest of any age", while the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim adopted a more critical view of the work, accusing Jones of multiple "errors and omissions", and of lacking objectivity.

[4] Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani maintain that Jones provides a misleading account of Freud's experimentation with cocaine: according to them, Jones' statement that cocaine "had for some time helped" to control the symptoms of Fleischl-Marxow's withdrawal from morphine is "vague and misleading" and "aimed at explaining how Freud could have made false claims for success in his 1884 and 1885 articles."

[12] Breger considered the book biased due to its status as an official biography, as well as its author's active role in the psychoanalytic movement and hostility to other analysts, including Rank and Ferenczi.

[14] Positive evaluations of the book include those of the historian Peter Gay,[15][16] the philosophers Jerome Neu and Richard Wollheim,[17][18] and the sociologist Christopher Badcock.

[19] Gay described the book as "beautifully informed",[15] and called it "the classic biography of Freud", adding that it "contains many astute judgments" despite Jones' poor style and tendency to "separate the man and the work."