Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind

Part of the acclaimed Eminent Lives series, Freud is a concise and seductive biography of the father of psychiatry. Dr. Peter D. Kramer, the author of Listening to Prozac and Against Depression offers a critical and sympathetic portrait, recognizing what is archaic in Freud’s work and also what endures, interpreting him as not only a pioneer, but as a writer whose work will survive among the classics of literature. |

Referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis," Sigmund Freud is credited with championing the "talking cure" and charting the human unconscious. Both revered and reviled, he was a brilliant innovator but also a man of troubling contradictions—sometimes tyrannical, often misrepresenting the course and outcome of his treatments to make the "facts" match his theories. Peter D. Kramer—acclaimed author, practicing psychiatrist, and a leading national authority on mental health—offers a stunning new take on this controversial figure. Kramer is at once critical and sympathetic, presenting Freud the mythmaker, the storyteller, the writer whose books will survive among the classics of our literature, and the genius who transformed the way we see ourselves.