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Willoughby explains the goal of the book as follows:
‘The affection and complexity of feeling Freud maintained for his half-brothers and their families in Britain is here revealed for the first time in detail. These relationships influenced his imagination, and his thinking and theorizing on mental structure and psychodynamics’.(p. 2)
Most Freud biographies begin by pointing out the extraordinary age structure of Freud’s early family environment and the fact that the family lived in a single room at Schlossergasse 117 in Freiberg (now Příbor in the Czech Republic). Sigmund Freud was the firstborn in the marriage between Jakob Freud and the 20-years-younger Amalie Nathanson and was born in May 1856. This was Jakob’s second or third marriage. He had two sons from his first marriage, Emanuel (born 1833) and Phillip (born 1836), who were old enough to have been Sigmund’s fathers. Two of Emanuel’s children, both of whom were Freud’s age, John (born 1854) and Pauline (born 1855), are mentioned in Freud’s article ‘Screen Memories’ (1899) and in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, where Freud describes an episode in which he and John behaved very badly (‘grausam’) towards Pauline. Even more importantly, Freud stated that his childhood friendship with John was decisive for his later relationships, as the dynamics of this friendship formed a pattern that repeated itself. In his discussion of the ‘Non vixit’ dream in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (1900), John is described as follows: ‘Until the end of my third year we had been inseparable. We loved each other and fought with each other; and this childhood relationship, as I have already hinted above, had a determining influence on all my subsequent relationships with contemporaries. Since that time my nephew John has had many re-incarnations, which revived now one side and now another of his personality, unalterably fixed as it was in my unconscious memory. … All my friends have in a certain sense been re-incarnations of th