Sigmund Freud. His Life in Pictures and Words: Edited by Ernst Freud, Lucie Freud and Ilse Grubrich-Simitis. With a Biographical sketch by K. R. Eissler. Translation by Christine Trollope. Designed by Willy Fleckhaus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. 1976. New York: A. Helen and Kurt Wolff Book. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1978. London: André Deutsch. 1978. pp. 350.

This is more than a picture-book. It supplements and completes Jones's (1953–57) classic official biography of Freud, and not only with its iconographic data but also by the extremely well-chosen and crisply apposite texts from Freud's multitudinous correspondences and writings that accompany it.

If one makes such a large claim for the merits of this book then one has to justify the demand that this book meets and explicate further how it achieves this end. To do this one has to travel several decades back into the nineteenth century.

Freud's had been a disturbing presence from his very beginnings, as Dr Kurt Eissler points out in his impeccably cogent, exhaustive and accurate 'biographical sketch' to this book, which is as informative about the essential facts of Freud's life and relationships, as it is lucid in charting the evolution of Freud's conceptual repertoire. Freud had rattled the smug composure of the established nineteenth century values: values that had the sovereignty of Empires and the solidity of the middle class wealth to bolster and defend them. Even if ever so precariously, both the Vienna of the Habsburg Empire with its prolix and exquisite decadence and the puritan arrogance of the Imperial England's self-satisfaction with its own virtues were at their height in human social intercourse.

In this cultural climate Freud launched, with an heroic but knowing intent, two basic ideas that were to perturb both the sleep and the relationships of every self-aware person ever after. Freud postulated that sexuality (which he later extended to include infantile sexuality as well) played the major role in the aetiology of the classic psychiatric syndrome of the era: hysteria. To this he added a further hypothesis that was to encompass the whole of human psychic functioning, namely that of the unconscious. Freud stated that man's consciousness was only a small, though functionally an essential and indispensable, part of the total psychic and affective e