Mortal Secrets

Starred review from January 29, 2024
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.

February 1, 2024
A significant biography with more than the usual emphasis on the vagaries of the subject's reputation. Prolific novelist and clinical psychologist Tallis, whose most recent nonfiction book was The Act of Living, declares that few major thinkers have been more vilified than Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). However, writes the author, "extreme Freud bashing" is offset by equally "unhelpful," overly reverent followers. An admirer but definitely not a worshipper, Tallis provides an expert portrait of a brilliant, obsessive, ruthless figure who was "right about some things and wrong about others." He was also a talented yet "very uneven" writer whose scientific papers are often an exercise in "narrative embellishment and opportunistic misrepresentation." An ambitious young neurologist in an era when psychological disorders were viewed as brain disease, Freud was not the first to consider them the result of traumatic memories or to employ the "talking cure," but his charisma, energy, and literary skills produced "a new way of understanding the mind, relationships, history and culture." Freud's later writings demonstrate that colleagues were outraged at first and shunned him, but Tallis writes bluntly that this is fiction. Vienna's late-19th-century Golden Age was open to new ideas in the arts and sciences, and Freud soon attracted a loyal following. By the time of his 1909 U.S. tour, he was an international celebrity. Since his death, neuroscience and therapeutic advances have not been kind to some of his theories, and some readers may agree with Tallis' comparison to Karl Marx. Both revealed genuine insights into the human condition that don't translate into practical benefits. Marxist economics has a poor record, and psychoanalysis is not "a cure--or, as cures go, not a very good one." Yet Freud remains a profound influence on modern culture. Convincingly critical and convincingly admiring--among the best of innumerable Freud bios.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.