Mortal Secrets

Brilliantly rich and vivid * The Times, Books of the Year *Fascinating… the best book I have read on Freud and Vienna. Lucid, sceptical, sagacious, it perfectly explains how we are all, like it or not, Freudians now * TLS, Books of the Year *Frank Tallis’s lucid storytelling makes him an ideal guide in this dangerous but perennially exciting terrain * Sebastian Faulks *Tallis makes Freud’s life and the lost world of Viennese society vividly comprehensible. Excellent and entertaining * Amanda Craig *An unusually well-balanced and remarkably fresh account of Freud’s life and work - in historical and cultural context - viewed from the perspective of our own troubled times, and with contemporary scientific hindsight * Mark Solms, author of The Brain and the Inner World *Convincingly critical and convincingly admiring-among the best of innumerable Freud bios… Tallis provides an expert portrait of a brilliant, obsessive, ruthless figure * Kirkus *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… Stunning in its breadth and depth, this is a magisterial treatment of a towering thinker * Publishers Weekly *[A] wonderful biography… Tallis attempts to redeem Freud’s “modernity” by considering him not so much as a scientist but as an artist and a product of the weird and gorgeous bloom of creativity and neurosis that flowered in the last decades of Habsburg Vienna – James Marriott * The Times *An accessible, fluent introduction to Freud’s life and work… Tallis’s book moves crisply between biographical scenes, snapshots of Vienna’s golden age, retellings of Freud’s significant case histories, and well-crafted summaries of Freud’s principal theories * Times Literary Supplement *Tallis’ clear-eyed judicious analysis is the best I’ve read - about the city and the man * William Boyd *

Dr Frank Tallis is a writer and clinical psychologist. His non-fiction books include The Incurable Romantic, The Act of Living, and Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and The Discovery of the Modern Mind, which was a book of the year in The Times. In the TLS William Boyd said ‘Tallis’ clear-eyed judicious analysis is the best I’ve read’. Tallis is also the author of the Liebermann Papers, a psychoanalytic detective series set in Freud’s Vienna and adapted for television as the BBC drama Vienna Blood. He lives in London.

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