Anzieu has written an exceptional book. His aim is to chart how Freud conducted his self-analysis primarily through studying his dreams and how Freud's concepts evolved from the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist. This is not just another biography of Freud. The story the author sets out to piece together is how psychoanalysis came to be invented. There is a double theme that runs like a guiding thread throughout the book: the relations between the discovery of psychoanalysis and the man who made it, and between the discovery and the millieu which produced it. What motivated Anzieu was a chance to reconstruct the creative psychic work that resulted in the discovery of psychoanalysis. He accomplished this by bringing together fragments of the same dream found in several different published works by Freud. He then compared the text of the dream with accounts of past and contemporary events described in Freud's correspondence or revealed by his biographers.