There are probably more biographies of Freud than of any other great thinker of the twentieth century. This book is more than another biography. The author explores the quality and quantity of Freud's European Jewishness, the question of belief in a Jewish God, and, finally, the importance of these convictions in the creation of psychoanalysis—“tentatively reconstructing the mental processes by which Freud turned his private confessions into a potent scientific instrument” (p. xiv).