Sigmund Freud

After decades of hagiographies and fiery condemnations, it is very difficult today to know who Sigmund Freud was. However, after the publication of the latest reference biographies, new archives have been opened to researchers and the essentials of the correspondence are now accessible. Therefore, this is an unbeatable moment to return to a man and a work about which there was much to say. The founder of psychoanalysis was, to begin with, a Viennese of the Belle Epoque, a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, heir to the German and Jewish Enlightenment. As for psychoanalysis itself, it is the fruit of a collective effort, of a cenacle in which Freud gave free rein to his fascination with the irrational and the occult sciences, sometimes turning his friends into enemies, acting as Faust but also as Mephistopheles. Modern thinker, but conservative in politics, he never stopped acting in a way that contradicts his work, always in the name of Reason and Enlightenment. Here is Freud in his time, in his family, surrounded by his collections, with his wives, his children, his dogs; faced with pessimism in the face of the rise of extremism, full of doubts at the time of undertaking his exile in London, where he will die. But we will also see him in ours, feeding our questions with his own doubts, his failures and his passions.