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Biography is by no means a homogeneous genre—neither through the course of history nor as it is written today. Its relationship to psychoanalysis, that other kind of life-story project, is controversial, while its place within historical writing has often been minimized and viewed as second-class (Caine 2010). Questions raised concern the nature of the data to be used to (re)construct the person's life and how far one may go inferentially with the material at hand. Just how personal should the biography become in order to convey the subject's character and personality? And does it need to? And how important is it to embed the individual's life and development within a contemporary social, cultural, and political context? (Kohut 1986, 2003).
If one approaches this study of Ernst Freud—third son and fourth child of Sigmund and Martha Freud, husband of Lucy Brasch, father of Stephan, Lucian, and Clemens, and a successful Berlin society architect—with curiosity into his inner world, his conflicts, fears, and fantasies, and his way of experiencing and relating to the significant people in his world, then one can only be disappointed. There is little offered here in that regard. This was clearly not the intent of the author, Volker Welter, a German-born professor of the History of Art and Architecture at UC, Santa Barbara, who was educated first in Berlin and then at the University of Edinburgh.
But if one wants a fascinating, impeccably researched, and carefully documented image of less-well-known aspects of the early history of psychoanalysis, including the development and design of the two public psychoanalytic clinics in Berlin, all accompanied by plentiful pictures and descriptions of the Freud-designed private homes and consulting rooms of several prominent first-generation analysts in Berlin and London, then this book should satisfy well. And there is more to recommend it, at least to a psychoanalytic audience interested in the psychology of architecture and the psyc