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The centerpiece of Freud's British Family: Reclaiming Lost Lives in Manchester and London is a richly rendered depiction of Freud's two older half-brothers, Emanuel and Philip, and their lives and families in England. How did there come to be a British branch of the Freud family? The same economic precarity that led the traveling merchant Jacob Freud to depart Freiburg and ultimately settle in Vienna with young Sigmund in tow would lead the adult children of Jacob's first marriage to migrate to Manchester in search of better opportunities in the family trade. The now-separated families would remain in touch, visit occasionally, and appear in Willoughby's telling to have played large roles in each other's imaginations.
The great psychic importance of Freud's half-brothers is dramatized in The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud regarded Emanuel's children, his childhood playmates, as formative in shaping his sensitivity to Oedipal passions, and it is John and Pauline whom he emplots in his famous dream scene of yellow flowers and black bread. The Dreambook also reveals Freud's adornment of his younger half-brother Phillip in fantasies of Oedipal loss, as he was old enough to be his mother's husband (thus to be Freud's father) and was instrumental in separating Freud from his Catholic nanny by alerting the family to her petty theft. These figures receive their deserved biographical due in Freud's British Family. Willoughby also marshals fresh archival material to flesh out Freud's two visits to England (one when he was a solitary unknown, the later when he was a sought-after public figure) and his final migration to 20 Maresfield Gardens. Freud's imagining of his family was a crucible for his conception of mind.
Willoughby frames the material he offers through a bottom-up historical approach that seeks to elucidate the lives of lesser sung individuals whose experiences remain unremarked upon in the historical record. In this attention to lost lives, Willoughby invokes both