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In this brief but spirited chronicle of Freud's life Phillips gives a moving portrait recalling the schoolboy who loved Shakespeare, antiquity and languages and who taught himself Castilian so he could read his favorite book, Don Quixote, in its original tongue. The author suggests that, in effect, the science of psychoanalysis can be seen
as a theoretical elaboration of this treasured book. Imagination flourished in the mind of this eccentric child, the first son of Jacob's second marriage, and the only person in the crowded family quarters to have a room of his own.
Phillips usefully contextualizes the invention of psychoanalysis within the Enlightenment ideals of rationality, free speech and the unsettled question of Jewish identity. Freud was descended from generations of persecuted Jews and early pages of the book argue that psychoanalysis was first and foremost an “immigrant science,” a psychology for outsiders, groups analogous to the child in Freud's theories in that they were forced to live in others' regimes (p. 159). Jacob's failing business in wool merchantry forced the family to move from the Moravian town of Freiberg to Leipzig, and then to Vienna by the time Freud was 4 years old. Phillips describes a transgenerational anxiety that fueled Freud's life's work: “if there is one spectre, one abiding fantasy that haunts all of Freud's work it is the prospect of losing everything… so we have to take seriously in any consideration of Freud's life the fact that the Jews of Freud's parents' generation lived extremely precarious lives” (p. 38-9).
Furthermore the author reminds us that psychoanalysis is a “homosexual artifact” (p. 109). The science that grew out of the casual Wednesday evening meetings begun by Freud in 1902 was conceived out of conversations among men about the sexuality of women. Women were the absent center of Freud's theoretical formulations; relatively little still is written of Amalia Nathansohn, Freud's mother, or his wife, Martha Bernays