Freud establishes a friendship with the devilish Italian physician Giacomo Lombardi. Freud has a bittersweet love affair with the quixotic Claudette, a young woman of doubtful reputation. He has a rewarding romance with Amelia, a fading, but still beautiful, middle-aged actress. He treats Alexandre Dumas fils, author of Our Lady of the Camellias for impotence. Freud helps Madame Delacroix, a hospital charity patient suffering from hysteria, to walk again. He becomes a father figure to the shy Odette, the abused lover of a man who suffers from Tourette’s syndrome. Freud resolves his ambivalence toward his fiancée, Martha Bernays. He is helped to acquire wisdom from Professor Gombert, a retired philosophy teacher.
The novel, written in the first-person, as if by Freud himself, centers on his emotional struggle to resolve the conflict between a forbidden attraction to Claudette and his desire for a conventional marriage to Martha.
Young Freud is a journey through the subterranean levels of both turn-of-the- century Paris and the unconscious mind.
If you have an interest in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and the nature of Freud’s personal life, this novel was written for you
