Hysterical: Anna Freud's Story

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Synopsis
Anna Freud (1885-1982) was Sigmund Freud's youngest daughter, and his closest emotional and intellectual companion, as well. Anna is the Freud child who, after Sigmund's death, bore his intellectual seed into the world. For nearly a century now it's been a well-kept secret that the love of Anna's life was another woman. And that was a problem for Sigmund, who agreed with medical colleagues that lesbianism is a symptom of hysteria. But Sigmund took concern about lesbianism one or two steps further than his colleagues. He considered it an actual gateway to profound mental illness. Worse (for him, regarding Anna), he said it is almost always caused by faulty fathering. HYSTERICAL: ANNA FREUD'S STORY is Anna's "lost memoir. " In it she tells of coming of age in a household in which the stories of deeply neurotic, often sexually troubled patients were standard conversational fare. She recounts the wildly inappropriate conversion therapy imposed on her by her father. She tells of her family's escape from the Nazis, and of their years of exile in London. These are years in which Sigmund aged and died, and in which Anna and her beloved Dorothy founded orphanages and schools for traumatized children. HYSTERICAL reads like lively, sometimes deeply moving, and occasionally even hilarious autobiography. But it's a historical novel written by a science journalist with a wicked sense of humor, an appreciation for both Anna's plight and that of Sigmund, and an eye and ear for the tugs of war that happen in families. As Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, once the Projects Director of the Freud Archives, describes it, HYSTERICAL "is the book we all wish Anna Freud had had the courage to write. "
Copyright:
2014

Book Details

Book Quality:
Excellent
Book Size:
349 Pages
ISBN-13:
9781938314421
Publisher:
She Writes Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Rebecca Coffey
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Biographies and Memoirs, Literature and Fiction, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender, Psychology
Submitted By:
Terry Gorman
Proofread By:
Terry Gorman
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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