Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind
Starred review from January 29, 2024
Psychologist Tallis (The Act of Living) takes a wide-ranging and fascinating look at how Sigmund Freud shaped and was shaped by the cultural ferment of late 19th- and early 20th-century Vienna. Tracking Freud from his upbringing in a small Moravian village to his enshrinement as the father of psychoanalysis, Tallis spares no detail in depicting his subject’s many sides. Assigning “unique” literary merit to Freud’s writings, Tallis asserts that The Interpretation of Dreams can be read “as a first-person, experimental novel” in the vein of works by James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Trivial anecdotes (Freud was scrupulous about his appearance and “visited the barber every day”) sit alongside more substantial character analyses, as when Tallis reveals Freud to be “capable of manipulation and deceit” on the one hand and intellectual cooperation on the other. Throughout, Tallis notes that psychology was one of many fields—including math, science, medicine, art, and philosophy—undergoing enormous changes in Vienna at the time. Examining Freud in the context of such intellectual movements as romanticism and modernism, Tallis observes that Freud was a revolutionary thinker not always because his ideas were new, but because he amalgamated and interpreted his predecessors’ insights in innovative ways. Stunning in its breadth and depth, this is a magisterial treatment of a towering thinker. Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander.