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Imagine a chilly, rainy night in Vienna in the autumn of 1929. An ordinary apartment building nestled between a butcher shop and a market is the home
to three remarkable households: Sigmund Freud, his wife Martha, and sister-in-law Minna, his daughter Anna, and Dorothy Burlingham, her devoted companion, and Dorothy's four children. All three households are gathered for dinner at the senior Freuds. The “Professor, “as he is called, presides over the melange; afflicted with cancer of the jaw, he is in constant pain but bears his pain in a stoic manner. His daughter Anna is a devoted caregiver, always solicitous of his needs. The Burlinghams had arrived in Vienna 4 years previously when, estranged from her troubled husband, Dorothy had sought Anna's help for talented but unruly Bob Burlingham Jr., the oldest of her four children and the father of the author of this book.
Granddaughter of Charles Louis Tiffany, the founder of Tiffany and Company, jewelers, and daughter of Louis Tiffany, the great artist in glass, Dorothy had arrived in Vienna with considerable financial resources, considerable connections to America's upper class, a touring car, and a fascination with the life of the mind. Soon all four of her children were in analysis with Anna Freud while both she and Anna had been or presently were in analysis with the Professor. Psychoanalysis was regarded by both father and daughter as a kind of conversation rather than as a formal medical treatment in the manner later institutionalized in the United States. Even while the Professor and Anna narrated detailed clinical histories of Burlingham family members in analysis with them, there was also personal closeness between the three households. Dorothy even had a private telephone line installed between her apartment on the fourth floor and Anna's apartment on the third floor as the two of them had quickly become closest friends.
In this book, originally published in 1989 and reissued in 2002, we are presented with an