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The world knows Freud as a thinker--one of the founding giants of modern culture. Now Lydia Flem paints a unique and unforgettable portrait of Frued the man: a father, husband, and friend, a secular Jew with passion for classical antiquity and European culture, torn between his need to be fully accepted in an anitsemitic society while remaining fatihful to his orgins.

Flem enters into the depths of Freud's creativity, showing how his thinking is connected to his immersion in the arts, the history of religions, and mythology. The intimate details of his daily life, his relationships with women, his poetic gifts, his travels, his dreams, his letters to family, friends, and colleagues: all reveal his vision of the unconscious. We accompany Freud on his walks through Vienna and Rome; look over his shoulder as he writes to his fiancee; learn the significance of the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian figurines that stand before him on his desk as he conceives his groundbreaking ideas; and discover the books, read in childhood, that later shape his self-analysis and his theoretical development.

Flem draws on an unusually broad range of sources, but she wears her learning lightly: her biography of Freud reads like a novel, full of vivid details and captivating human interest. From the 6-year-old gleefully tearing up a book illustrated with pictures of Persia; to the young doctor balancing his scientific training with his love of Shakespeare; to the psychoanalyst in his prime, conquering the resistance to his theories; to the old man, ravaged by illness, forced to flee into exile in England, Lydia Flem leads us deep into the life of a genius.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Introduction(p. ix)
• 1. Creation Day by Day(p. 1)
• 2. Through the Train Window(p. 11)
• 3. The Archeologist(p. 27)
• 4. The Conquistador: Athens, Rome, Jerusalem(p. 51)
• 5. The Man without a Country(p. 77)
• 6. The Man of the Book(p. 93)
• 7. In the Witch's Kitchen(p. 121)
• 8. The Shade of the Poet(p. 139)
• 9. The Metaphor Man(p. 167)
• 10. The Friend(p. 181)
• References(p. 203)
• Index(p. 215)

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Library Journal Review

French psychoanalyst Flem (Casanova) writes a rhapsodic, deeply thoughtful valentine to Sigmund Freud. The book's subtitle misleads in a way, since there is no systematic treatment of Freud's ideas or of the psychoanalytic movement. In ten chapters, she portrays "not a therapist but a conqueror, an archeologist, a detective of the human soul," using mainly the letters written by the great correspondent. Flem sees Freud as a warmly human viewer of scenes (from a train window), a master of words and metaphor, a marginal Jewish scientist and creative writer, an anxious explorer of ancient cities, and an ambivalent friend. She brings out neglected influences like Cervantes and Ludwig B?rne and Freud's affinity for opera and song. Ideally paired with Louis Breger's Freud, this is a wonderful dessert for those who know Freud, a fine aperitif for those who don't. Highly recommended for larger general and all psychology collections.-E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Flem's psychoanalytic biography uses recurring themes in Freud's work and demonstrates how she thinks they influenced his thinking. Flem starts with trains and holds that the family move to Vienna when Freud was a child led him to view things as if from a train window. She follows this with discussion of archaeology (Freud regarded himself as an archeologist of the mind); a geography of places, particularly ancient Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome; his cultural and geographic identity as a Jew (not a religious one); and his love of books, particularly poetry and classic authors such as Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, a love that, according to Flem, often lead to Freud's "involuntary" novelistic style. Friendships and family were particularly important to him, and his friends ranged from university colleagues to his "brothers" in B'nai B'rith, several writers, and his dogs. His life was his work, and he was a man of habits who ate lunch every day at the same time, usually took his vacations at the same place each year, needed little sleep, liked to read but not scientific journals (which he regarded as boring), and wrote vast numbers of letters. Flem has given us a different and unique picture of Freud, whom she regards as a genius. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Extensive collections. V. L. Bullough University of Southern California

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Lydia Flem is the author of several books on Freud and Freudianism She is a practicing psychoanalyst and lives in Brussels and Paris with her husband and daughter