Freud's Patients: A Book of Lives (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781789144550)

Portraits of the thirty-eight known patients Sigmund Freud treated clinically--some well-known, many obscure--reveal a darker, more complex picture of the famed psychoanalyst.

Everyone knows the characters described by Freud in his case histories: "Dora," the "Rat Man," the "Wolf Man." But what do we know of the people, the lives behind these famous pseudonyms: Ida Bauer, Ernst Lanzer, Sergius Pankejeff? Do we know the circumstances that led them to Freud's consulting room, or how they fared--how they really fared--following their treatments? And what of those patients about whom Freud wrote nothing, or very little: Pauline Silberstein, who threw herself from the fourth floor of her analyst's building; Elfriede Hirschfeld, Freud's "grand-patient" and "chief tormentor;" the fashionable architect Karl Mayreder; the psychotic millionaire Carl Liebmann; and so many others? In an absorbing sequence of portraits, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen offers the stories of these men and women--some comic, many tragic, all of them deeply moving. In total, thirty-eight lives tell us as much about Freud's clinical practice as his celebrated case studies, revealing a darker and more complex Freud than is usually portrayed: the doctor as his patients, their friends, and their families saw him.

Author: Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen
ISBN-10: 1789144558
ISBN-13: 9781789144550
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Language: English
Published: 11/03/2021
Pages: 256
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.50h x 6.20w x 1.20d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 08/01/2022