Freud in his time and ours / Élisabeth Roudinesco ; translated by Catherine Porter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 1944- author.

Contributor:

Porter, Catherine, 1941- translator.

Standardized Title:

Sigmund Freud en son temps et dans le nôtre. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939.

Freud, Sigmund.

Psychoanalysts--Austria--Biography.

Psychoanalysts.

History.

Austria.

Psychoanalysis--History.

Psychoanalysis.

Austria--History--19th century.

Austria--History--20th century.

Genre:

Biographies.

History.

Physical Description:

viii, 580 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2016.

Summary:

Élisabeth Roudinesco offers a bold and modern reinterpretation of the iconic founder of psychoanalysis. Based on new archival sources, this is Freud's biography for the twenty-first century--a critical appraisal, at once sympathetic and impartial, of a genius greatly admired and yet greatly misunderstood in his own time and in ours. Roudinesco traces Freud's life from his upbringing as the eldest of eight siblings in a prosperous Jewish-Austrian household to his final days in London, a refugee of the Nazis' annexation of his homeland. She recreates the milieu of fin de siècle Vienna in the waning days of the Habsburg Empire--an era of extraordinary artistic innovation, given luster by such luminaries as Gustav Klimt, Stefan Zweig, and Gustav Mahler. In the midst of it all, at the modest residence of Berggasse 19, Freud pursued his clinical investigation of nervous disorders, blazing a path into the unplumbed recesses of human consciousness and desire. Yet this revolutionary who was overthrowing cherished notions of human rationality and sexuality was, in his politics and personal habits, in many ways conservative, Roudinesco shows. In his chauvinistic attitudes toward women, and in his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the growing threat of Hitler until it was nearly too late, even the analytically-minded Freud had his blind spots. Alert to his intellectual complexity--the numerous tensions in his character and thought that remained unresolved--Roudinesco ultimately views Freud less as a scientific thinker than as the master interpreter of civilization and culture. Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Part One. The life

Beginnings

Loves, tempests, ambitions

The invention of psychoanalysis

Part Two. The conquest

The Belle Époque

Disciples and dissidents

The discovery of America

The war of nations

Part Three. At home

Dark enlightenment

Families, dogs, objects

The art of the couch

Among women

Part Four. The final years

Between fetish medicine and religion

Facing Hitler

Death at work.

Notes:

"First published as Sigmund Freud en son temps et dans le notre"--Title page verso.

Translated from the French.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674659568

0674659562

OCLC:

946032136