Sigmund Freud Life and Work – Vol. 1. The Young Freud (1856-1900) + Vol. 2 Years of Maturity (1901-1919) + Vol. 3 The Last Phase (1919-1939) + Letters (1873-1939) by Ernest Jones

In the few years since its publication, the three-volume Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, by Ernest Jones, has been recognised as both the definitive life of Freud and an authentic classic of biography. Here now is Jones’s Freud, edited and abridged in a single volume. To accomplish it, the editors have deleted those portions of the original trilogy which dealt principally with the technical aspects of Freud’s work. The result is a new classic for the general reader. Freud’s childhood and adolescence; the excitement and trials of his four-year engagement to Martha Bernays, as revealed in their love letters; his early experiments with hypnotism and cocaine; the incredible freeing of his creative powers through self-analysis; the slow rise of his reputation and the constant battles against distortion and personal slander; the painful defections of some of his close associates; the years of international eminence; the onset of the cancer from which he suffered for sixteen years; his seizure by the Gestapo in Nazified Austria; his stoicism in the face of an agonising death — all this is unfolded in a book that remains, in the words of The New York Times, “one of the outstanding biographies of the age,” and which now emerges as more readable, more affecting, more inspiring than before.