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. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1978. 350 pp.

This book is a treasure for anyone who cares about Freud and his work. The visual images have a poignant evocative power, and they are accompanied by fragments, mostly Freud's own words, that make up a verbal miniature mosaic of an autobiography. Kurt Eissler's biographical sketch, beautiful and succinct, manages not only to outline Freud's life and character, but the development of his ideas as well. The photographs, familiar and unfamiliar, are for the most part reproduced very well on heavy paper. One can see (even in black-and-white) the power of the "terrible blue eyes" of Professor Brücke. One hauntingly lovely picture of the young Anna Freud ("my Antigone") would by itself justify owning this book (p. 275). Perhaps most moving of all is the sequence of photographs of Freud in his last years. These reflect the heroic stoicism of the old conquistador fighting the Nazis, the agony of his cancer, old age, and death. One sees the integrity in the face of the man who refused adequate sedation up to the day he died; who wrote, "I prefer to think in torment rather than not to be able to think clearly." The book's final pages have the transcendent tragic impact of Beethoven's last piano sonatas or of the late self-portraits of Rembrandt.