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Diane O'Donoghue approaches Freud's early psychoanalytic project from the perspective of art history and archaeology. The cover image below the book title On Dangerous Ground is dominated by heavy brown tones, the colours of soil, clay and stone. It shows the relief of Vienna as painted by Frans Geffels in 1683, the medieval city walls forming zigzag structures highlighted by bulwarks and bastions, surrounded by deep moats and banks, with dams and dark green slopes in the background. These were the landmarks distinctive of Vienna until the walls were demolished, between 1858 and 1874, and replaced by the circular grand boulevard Ringstraße. O'Donoghue calls our attention to the fact that the three-year-old Sigismund Freud arrived in Vienna with his parents and siblings in 1859, at the beginning of this formative process. Her study proceeds under the assumption that the emerging modern architecture of the city, above all the Ringstraße, must have been associated with the promise of emancipation and civic subjectivity for the relocating family. After having left Moravia, the Freud family had been denied a residence permit in Leipzig and ordered to depart from there overnight. Unlike most other possible destinations, the Habsburg capital Vienna was known to be open towards Jewish residents following the upheavals of 1848. Nevertheless, during the lifetime of Freud, this urban terrain successively became