Freud: From Youthful Dream to Mid-Life Crisis

Drawing from highly personal correspondence, some of which has only recently been released, this illuminating biography applies a developmental approach to Freud's youth and transition to middle age. It reconstructs the years during which Freud determined his goals, suffered a crisis resulting from his inability to realize them, and fought his way through to the creation of psychoanalysis. In so doing, the book reveals the great complexity of Freud's personal reality and simultaneously challenges critiques of his thinking. This book will be of interest to readers in the history of psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud.

Table of Contents:
Part I: Getting Ready. A Theory of Lives. The Stuff of Dreams: Cultural and Familial Threads. Dream Weaving (Birth to Age 17). Part II: Setting Sail. The Journey from Adolescence to the Adult World (Ages 17 to 22): A Second Element Added to the Dream. Entering the Adult World (Ages 22 to 28). The Age-30 Transition (Ages 28 to 33): From Student to Physician and Paterfamilias. Settling Down and Becoming His Own Man (Ages 33 to 40). Part III: The Mid-Life Transition. Losing the Way (Ages 40 to 43): The Initial Phase of the Mid-Life Transition. Lost (Ages 43 to 45): The Final Phase of the Mid-Life Transition. A Wider Realm (After Age 45): The Entry into Middle Age and Beyond.

About the Author :
Peter M. Newton is Professor of Psychology at The Wright Institute in Berkeley and in private practice. He was born in Oakland, California and educated at the University of Washington, Columbia, and Yale, where he subsequently taught. He is author of Freud: From Youthful Dream to Mid-Life Crisis and has written extensively in the areas of adult development and psychoanalytic treatment.

Review :
Peter Newton's excellent intellectual biography of Freud's early-to-middle years captures the dramatic movement of a life, and the gradually deepening illumination of character that one ordinarily might look for in a novel. These qualities make his study of Freud sympathetic, original, and particularly engaging. It will be valuable to anyone interested in the man who determined much that we think about ourselves, as well as a good deal about how we think; but it should be said that in the tone and organization and choice of scenes from Freud's life, Newton has written a book with a life of its own. - Leonard Michaels, University of California