Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This biography of Freud provides an overview of his life and of the academic life of other early psychoanalysts. It also discusses his Jewishness - the way it influenced his life and the anti-Semitism in Vienna - while emphasizing his bourgeois aspirations.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Foreword to the Norton Paperback Edition (p. vii)
• Preface (p. xv)
• 1 A Greed for Knowledge (p. 3)
• Food for Memories (p. 4)
• The Lure of Research (p. 22)
• Freud in Love (p. 37)
• A Necessary Friend- and Enemy (p. 55)
• 2 The Theory in the Making (p. 55)
• Hysterics, Projects, and Embarrassments (p. 69)
• Self-Analysis (p. 87)
• 3 Psychoanalysis (p. 103)
• The Secret of Dreams (p. 104)
• A Psychology for Psychologists (p. 117)
• From Rome to Vienna: a Progress (p. 132)
• A Map for Sexuality (p. 142)
• 4 Sketch of an Embattled Founder (p. 153)
• At Fifty (p. 153)
• Pleasures of the Senses (p. 162)
• The Wednesday Psychological Society (p. 173)
• The Foreigners (p. 179)
• 5 Psychoanalytic Politics (p. 197)
• Jung: the Crown Prince (p. 197)
• American Interlude (p. 206)
• Vienna Versus Zurich (p. 213)
• Jung: the Enemy (p. 225)
• 6 Therapy and Technique (p. 244)
• A Problematic Debut (p. 246)
• Two Classic Lessons (p. 255)
• In His Own Cause: Leonardo, Schreber, Fliess (p. 267)
• In His Own Cause: the Politics of the Wolf Man (p. 285)
• A Handbook for Technicians (p. 292)
• Matters of Taste (p. 306)
• 7 Applications and Implications (p. 306)
• Foundations of Society (p. 324)
• Mapping the Mind (p. 335)
• The End of Europe (p. 342)
• 8 Aggressions (p. 361)
• Comprehensive and Momentous Things (p. 361)
• Uneasy Peace (p. 374)
• Death: Experience and Theory (p. 390)
• Eros, Ego, and Their Enemies (p. 403)
• 9 Death Against Life (p. 417)
• Intimations of Mortality (p. 417)
• Anna (p. 428)
• The Price of Popularity (p. 446)
• Vitality: the Berlin Spirit (p. 459)
• 10 Flickering Lights on Dark Continents (p. 470)
• Rank and the Consequences (p. 470)
• Doctors' Dilemmas (p. 489)
• Woman, the Dark Continent (p. 501)
• Against Illusions (p. 523)
• 11 Human Nature at Work (p. 523)
• Civilization: the Human Predicament (p. 543)
• The Ugly Americans (p. 553)
• Trophies and Obituaries (p. 571)
• 12 To Die in Freedom (p. 588)
• The Politics of Disaster (p. 588)
• Defiance as Identity (p. 597)
• Finis Austriae (p. 611)
• Death of a Stoic (p. 629)
• Abbreviations (p. 653)
• Notes (p. 655)
• Bibliographical Essay (p. 741)
• Acknowledgments (p. 781)
• Index (p. 787)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This simply wonderful book will take its place among the definitive biographies of Freud. The author, an historian and superb writer with psychoanalytical training, has written extensively on Freud and the era in which he worked. While clearly partial to Freud, Gay gives a far more balanced and at times critical account of his life than Ernest Jones's very orthodox The Life & Work of Sigmund Freud and hence will provide a far more valuable refutation of works hostile to Freud. Outstanding features include the in-depth, lucid discussion of Freud's major works and masterful evocation of the epoch that ended in the terror of Nazi-occupied Vienna. Accessible and entertaining as well as comprehensive and technically rigorous; a great addition to the field. Paul Hymowitz, Cornell Medical Ctr., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Gay's engrossing portrait of Freud is unconventional, at times startling. We see how a doting, domineering mother equipped young Sigmund for a life of intrepid investigation. We follow the ambitious medical student's long, sexually starved courtship of Martha Bernays, a romance that, according to Gay, influenced his theories about the sexual roots of mental ailments. Freud continually analyzed his own unresolved conflicts, blaming his fainting spells on unconscious homosexual urges. Though he preached that the psychoanalyst should be detached during therapy sessions, he bent and even broke his own rules, returning fees to patients who fell on hard times and making friends with his favorite analysands. Perhaps no biographer has succeeded as well as Gay in linking Freud's life to his writings and his times. In this magisterial biography by the eminent cultural historian (The Bourgeois Experience, etc.), Freud's greatness and his flaws flow out of the same stubborn, obsessive quest for truth. Photos not seen by PW. (April) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This is the latest biography of Sigmund Freud, and the most significant since Ernest Jones's three-volume work (published 1953-57) which it supercedes. Peter Gay is well-equipped for the task. German is his mother tongue, he is a leading historian of 19th- and 20th-century Europe, is a Pulitzer Prize recipient for his study of the Enlightenment, and has written extensively on Freud and German culture. Gay is also a research graduate of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. The book is beautifully written. Gay's approach is to try to understand Freud and his alliances and environment rather than to worship or challenge him. Unlike Jones, he weaves the development of Freud's thought into his life and times. Gay has a wonderful unfolding sense of the aggregations in Freud's theory-building. With access to papers not available to others, Gay has much to say on topics that have intrigued many--Freud's mother, his relationship to his wife and her sister, the analysis of his daughter Anna, and his problematic closeness to and alienation from Breuer, Fliess, Jung, etc. The strength of the work is in the impeccable scholarship, in Gay's juxtapositions of historical evidence surrounding the great man, and in the recovery of new data that enrich rather than startle. Essential for all reader levels with an interest in Freud. -R. H. Balsam, Yale University

Booklist Review

This highly readable, remarkably frank reassessment of Freud covers both the private life and career of the seminal Viennese psychiatrist. [BKL Ap 1 88]

Kirkus Book Review

As foreshadowed by his previous work (Freud for Historians, A Godless Jew, etc.) and suggested by his subtitle, Gay's long, comprehensive biography of Sigmund Freud is--unlike much recent Freud-iana--more reverent than revisionist. But Gay is candid enough about Freud's failings, and authoritative enough about the vast, complex sources and issues, to make this the most credible summing-up of Freud's achievement thus far--if not the most congenial or manageable sort of book for the general reader. Throughout, Gay acknowledges the private obsessions, neurotic blind spots, and cultural limitations that came into play during Freud's career as researcher, theorist, self-analyst pioneer, and leader: his ""impressive capacity for repressing inconvenient memories""; his ""need for martyrdom"" (stemming from a childhood bedeviled by sibling rivalry); his devious, rageful aggressiveness in scientific politics. But ""if there was ever a physician poised to convert his mistakes into sources of insight, it was Freud."" And Gay views nearly all the crucial developments in psychoanalytic theory--the Oedipus complex, the unconscious, narcissism, the dynamics of repression, the ego/id/superego topography, etc.--as hard-won truths, often involving ""agonizing"" second thoughts. In only one area--Freud's uneven attempts at female psychology--does Gay stress failure rather than triumph: Freud ""was strenuously defending himself against the recognition that the tie to his mother was in any sense imperfect."" Likewise, the portrait of Freud-the-man is balanced but fundamentally admiring: kindly, faithful, if far-from-passionate husband; warm father, unconsciously ""seductive"" with doting daughter Anna; stoic victim of longterm cancer; tetchy, demanding colleague--but never the villain sketched by Paul Roazen, et al. For Gay, above all, Freud is heir to the 18th-century Enlightenment--open-minded (even to telepathy) but, while proudly Jewish, impervious to religion's irrational consolations. The extensive, sturdy explications of theory here inevitably undermine the life-history's chronology, focus, and drama. Newcomers to psychoanalysis will probably flounder; specialists may find that Gay's eclectic approach doesn't give quite enough attention to their concerns. (Some theoretical/historical brouhahas are relegated to footnotes.) But, for the fairly sophisticated reader who wants both Life and Work at once, this densely challenging, literate study is likely to be the strongest choice for some time to come. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Peter Gay lives in New York City and Connecticut.