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Despite the alluring title, there is little that is new here for someone in the field, and, as an introduction, the book leaves much to be desired. The work can be criticized on its internal organization as well as on its presentation of psychoanalytic theory.
In the first several chapters, the author uses quotations and plot summaries of period novels and current historical works to paint a picture of the latter half of nineteenth-century Austria. Her purpose here is to show whence Freud and his theories arose and to show (yet again) reasons for the hostile reception of his work.
She describes the well-defined roles of persons in a middle-class family as paralleling the political order desired by Emperor Franz Josef. She stresses the importance of the nuclear family, obedience to the father, the concept of the innocence of the child, and the sadistic punishment of the child who was not innocent or well behaved. She describes Vienna as a city of paradoxes in which one could see the transition from "rational man" to "psychological man," who, she says, was "a more interesting but also more dangerous and unpredictable creature …" (p. 47). She mentions the theme of "the double" as presented in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilder's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and relates this to Freud's concept of conscious and unconscious.