Freud's Patients: A Book of Lives

I was first drawn to this under-the-radar book by its cover, with its fascinatingly odd photo of Sergius Pankejeff, the patient Freud called the "Wolf Man," as a child, and by its premise: short portraits of 38 men and women who underwent psychoanalysis with the Great Man. Freud's greatness has been questioned for decades, but few critiques could be as quietly devastating as this one, made all the more effective by the deadpan style with which Borch-Jacobsen, a longtime Freud scholar and UW professor, wields his scalpel. He gives little time to Freud's famous (and apparently fanciful) case histories of his patients, instead telling their life stories in a way that nearly always reveals the utter failure of Freud's treatment. An incomplete but merciless portrait of Dr. Freud, it doubles as an intriguing view into the hothouse of wealthy Jewish Vienna at the turn of the previous century.