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Lars Sjögren, psychoanalyst, member of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Society, has written a book about Freud, based on a selection of Freud's texts. It is an excellent study of Freud, built on chronologically arranged critical explications of the selected papers, with a rich bibliography pertaining to these texts. The author gives us very abridged but relevant information concerning Freud's relatives, colleagues, patients, and of cultural and political events of importance to Freud and his family.
The title may be misleading as this is not an ordinary biography. You would need Ernest Jones' or Peter Gay's works should you wish to know what has been dug out of domestic details from the long and dramatic life Freud lived, and you would need, for example, Stefan Zweig's report from life in Vienna at that time to understand the threat af syphilis, illegitimate pregnancies and poverty. The leading part in Sjögren's narrative is played by Freud's texts through which he is seen as the author of psychoanalytical papers and books on the growing theory, and as the leader, like Moses for the Jews, of the movement.
We are also told in the introduction that the book was conceived during many year's seminars on Freud's papers. No doubt Sjögren has written a book which students of psychoanalysis are voluptuously going to read. It is witty and certainly is capable of provoking many thoughts in the critical reader. In French, Lacanian style, you will find echoes from famous poems creeping in to the author's wording, which sometimes is rather idiosyncratic, with personal exclamations occasionally completing the sentence. This makes the text come alive, which is not the rule when it comes to a psychoanalytic discourse such as this one.
Sjögren has a tendency to upgrade Freud, if this word which stems