Mortal Secrets
Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind
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- $329.00
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- $329.00
Descripción editorial
A chronicle of Vienna's Golden Age and the influence of Sigmund Freud on the modern world by a clinical psychologist whose mystery novels form the basis of PBS's Vienna Blood series.
Some cities are like stars. When the conditions are right, they ignite, and burn with such fierce intensity that they outshine every other city on the planet. Vienna was one such city and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the birthplace of the modern mind and the way we live today. Long coffee menus and celebrity interviews are Viennese inventions. ‘Modern’ buildings were appearing in Vienna long before they started appearing in New York and the idea of practical modern home design originated in the work of Viennese architect Adolf Loos. The place, however, where one finds the most indelible and profound impression of Viennese influence is inside your head. How we think about ourselves has been largely determined by Vienna’s most celebrated resident, Sigmund Freud.
In Mortal Secrets, Frank Tallis brilliantly illuminates Sigmund Freud and his times, taking readers into the mind of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, chronicling the evolution of psychoanalysis and opening up Freud’s life to embrace the Vienna he lived in and the lives of the people he mingled with from Gustav Klimt to Arnold Schönberg, Egon Schiele to Gustav Mahler. Mortal Secrets is a thrilling book about a heady time in one of the world’s most beautiful cities and its long shadow that extends through the twentieth century up until the present day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
