Freud by RICHARD WEBSTER This book is 600 pages shorter than the first book I wrote about Freud and perhaps Madame de Sévigné’s words may help to explain why it has taken so long to appear. Decanting a two-gallon jug of wine into a pint-sized bottle is not an easy task but that is what I have tried to do. A few drops have inevitably been spilled but this book does manage to tell the main story. It focuses on Freud’s treatment of sex and the manner in which he wove his theories into his therapeutic methods. But it also locates the origins of psychoanalysis in medical history. It shows how Freud, failing to understand the depth of the neurological ignorance which prevailed in turn-of-the century Europe, made Charcot's diagnostic errors into the very foundations of his own science. ‘In this brief book, as in his earlier much longer work, Richard Webster has shone a bright and steady light into the dark, tangled, sometimes shocking world of Freud and his theories. Even when Freud stands convicted, it is usually out of his own mouth, while Webster’s style remains a model of calm lucidity.’ SEBASTIAN FAULKS
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IT WAS MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ who wrote to one of her correspondents that, since she did not have time to write a short letter, she was writing a long one instead.
