Freud¿s Patients - A Book of Lives

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,...