This highly accessible and readable book chronicles the lives of thirty-eight of Freud’s patients. Using a variety of sources Borch-Jacobsen compiles an evidenced trajectory of their lives, focusing on their relationship with psychoanalysis and in particular with Sigmund Freud.

Throughout, Borch-Jacobsen demonstrates an admirable scholarship, “reconstruct[ing]”, in his own words,

the sometimes comical, most often tragic and always captivating stories of these patients who have long been nameless and faceless. (author’s preface, 7)

His purpose is to “allow the reader to get an idea of Freud’s actual clinical practice, over and above the fabulous narratives he himself drew from it” (8).