Ilse Grubrich-Simitis

Many of the pictures are from the family album, others are of friends, colleagues, and of places and artworks of significance to Freud. All are accompanied by excerpts from his writing, largely from his personal letters, which are lively, often funny, and at times very moving.

An intimate and revealing pictorial biography of one of the twentieth century's great revolutionaries. To understand the Freudian revolution, it is necessary to understand the private Freud as well as the public man. This magnificent book, which uses illustrations assembled from family collections and from manuscripts, letters, and published material, sets out to discover the side of Freud the world did not often see. Each photograph is captioned by a passage from Freud's own writing that pinpoints its place in his life. The result is an astonishingly immediate and stirring document that brings to life, often very touchingly, the husband and grandfather, the devoted friend, the comfortable bourgeois citizen, the radical thinker, the collector of antiquities, and, at the end of a long life, the cancer-racked exile from Nazism.… (meer)