Freud's Mistress
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
“A thrilling story of seduction, betrayal, and loss, Freud’s Mistress will titillate fans of Memoirs of a Geisha and The Other Boleyn Girl.”—Booklist
In fin-de-siècle Vienna, it was not easy for a woman to find fulfillment both intellectually and sexually.
But many believe that Minna Bernays was able to find both with one man—her brother-in-law, Sigmund Freud.
At once a portrait of two sisters—the rebellious, independent Minna and her inhibited sister, Martha—and of the compelling and controversial doctor who would be revered as one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers, Freud’s Mistress is a novel rich with passion and historical detail and “a portrait of forbidden desire [with] a thought-provoking central question: How far are you willing to go to be happy?”*
*Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A portrait of forbidden desire based on historical speculations, Mack and Kaufman's thoroughly researched novel explores the difficult moral questions that can arise from adultery. It all begins in 1895 at Berggasse 19 in Vienna, an apartment that's home to Sigmund and Martha Freud, their six children, and the household's latest addition, Minna Bernays, Martha's sister, who's in between jobs. In contrast to her hypochondriac domestic sister, Minna is an unmarried, intellectually inclined "bibliomaniac," and is stimulated, rather than repulsed, by Sigmund's research especially his controversial theories about sexuality. Minna happily strokes her brother-in-law's ego in drug-fueled late-night discussions of philosophy, his patients' sexual traumas, and his own difficult marriage. When Minna finally comes to terms with her attraction to the charismatic Sigmund, she tries to resist these dangerous impulses, only to fall into a passionate affair after an improbably romantic overture from the father of psychoanalysis. Minna grapples with the "burden of betrayal" and Sigmund's cunning rationalizations while trying to answer this novel's clich d but nonetheless thought-provoking central question: how far are you willing to go to be happy?
