The author describes the four-hour encounter between Freud and Gustav Mahler in 1910 just eight months before the death of Mahler by endocarditis. Freud later said, 'I analyzed Mahler for an afternoon'.

Mahler had come to talk over his impotence, politely phrased as 'having withdrawn' from his wife. He had been cuckolded by, or at least with, the advice and consent of another psychiatrist who had introduced a young lover to his wife while she was at a sanatorium. (The results were very similar to those in the story, Fear, by Stefan Zweig.) In his open adulation of genius Kuehn tends to