It details Freud’s professional career in 19th century

Vienna — a metropolis with an active artistic and scientifi

c community, where modern man’s self-deceptions

and fragile identities played out in various kinds of nervous

diseases. The book retraces the genesis of Freud’s

ground-breaking theories on sexuality and neurosis,

dreams and the unconscious, on family and society, fairy

tales and myth. Drawing on his previously unpublished

work, the author tells the story of the psychoanalytic

movement: it is a story about victory and defeat, about

the politics of social hierarchies and power struggles,

heated controversies and bitter disappointments. Sigmund

Freud emerges as a complex character, who was a

self-critical dogmatist and a scientifi c explorer, a Jewish

atheist and a devoted father of a family, an expert of classical

antiquity, a learned reader and a brilliant writer.

Sigmund Freud knew the torments of the soul from personal

experience, which his psychoanalysis was meant

to cure.