Sigmund Freud, still hailed as “the most famous and most controversial thinker of the 20th century,” published 20 books and more than 300 articles during his long lifetime. He also left extensive drafts, notes, diaries, and annotations in his vast library, ransomed from the Nazis by Princess Marie Bonaparte upon his forced relocation from Vienna to London in 1938, a year before he died.

Of the more than 20,000 letters Freud wrote, about half survive. The man has already been the subject of several dozen biographies. Indeed, as the French historian and psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco remarks: “Every moment of Freud’s life has been discussed and every line of his work interpreted in multiple ways.” There have been countless essays on “Freud and .  .  . religion, Freud and women, Freud the clinician, Freud the family man, Freud with his cigars, Freud and neurons, Freud and dogs .  .  . and so on.” And then, of course, there are the Freud-bashers, among whom still more versions can be found: “Freud the rapacious, Freud the organizer of a clinical gulag, the demoniacal, incestuous, lying, counterfeiting, fascist Freud.” As Roudinesco notes: