num_pages: 856
description: In the 1880’s, Vienna was the glamor capital of Europe, and it was in that gay and brilliant city that Sigmund Freud began his long struggle to free people everywhere from the blindfolds and chains of their unknown natures.The Passions of the Mind is the story of that extraordinary man—a story upon which Irving Stone has lavished his talents as a biographical novelist and five years of tireless research and writing. Freud was one of Vienna’s most distinguished neurologists. He gave up a life of respectability and affluence to become a daring researcher of uncharted seas in an effort to forever change man’s understanding of himself. He was a pioneer explorer of the dark and fearsome frontiers of the sexual nature of man, for which he was made…a pariah!The Passions of the Mind takes the reader back to Freud’s obscure beginnings, his development as a promising pathologist; his training under a famous neurologist in Paris; his discovery of male hysteria, for which he was cast out by his Viennese psychiatry chief; his training in hypnotism in Nancy; and then the slow, shattering discovery of the unconscious and the science of psychonalaysis.There are delightful portraits of Freud’s wife, Martha Bernays, and of the witty Tante Minna, who lived with them; of his close friends and followers, Lou Andreas-Salomé, mistress of the poet Rilke, and the philosopher Nietzche; Princess Marie Bonaparte of Greece, who ransomed him from the Nazis; and his small band of disciples: including Alfred Adler, Ernest Jones, A. A. Brill, and the man Freud chose to become his Crown Prince and successor, Carl Jung.Freud shocked the society of his time with his theories of the sexual origins of neuroses. Mr. Stone leads us convincingly into this hitherto little-known world, showing through hundreds of incredible interwoven cases the astounding new scientific and human horizons that had been opened up.The Passions of the Mind is a novel as big as its subject. It brings us as a participant into the life and career of a bold one, Sigmund Freud, who proved that some of the most exciting challenges are not met on the battlefield or on icy mountain peaks, but inside the heart and mind of an individual human being.
language: English
title: The Passions of the Mind
titlecomplete: The Passions of the Mind
characters: Sigmund Freud
genres: Historical, Biography, American, Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Unfinished, History, Psychoanalysis
ratings_count: 1728
places: Austria
publisher: Doubleday & Company