The Dreamers of Vienna 

Vienna around 1900 was a capital of two million people, new boulevards and old anxieties, producing Mahler, Klimt, Schnitzler and Wittgenstein while its doctors treated an epidemic of what the age called nerves. Middle-class patients arrived with paralysis, blindness and lost voices that no lesion explained, and mainstream medicine answered with rest cures and electricity.

Sigmund Freud, trained in Ernst Brücke's physiology laboratory and marked by Charcot's demonstrations in Paris, tried the opposite: treat the symptom as a message. He borrowed the talking cure from Josef Breuer's case of Anna O, dropped hypnosis, dropped his hand on the patient's forehead, and arrived at free association. The Interpretation of Dreams followed in 1899, six hundred copies that took years to sell.

From 1902 four doctors met in his waiting room on Wednesday evenings. Within a decade psychoanalysis had journals, societies from Berlin to New York, and a habit of expelling its strongest critics: Adler in 1911, then Jung, whose collective unconscious and general theory of libido were treated as defection rather than hypothesis.

This collection tells that story and then asks the harder question. Popper, Grünbaum, Eysenck and modern memory research dismantled much of the theory: wish-fulfilment dreams, universal Oedipal stages, recoverable repressed memories. What survived is real too: talking therapy, transference, defences, and the plain fact that most of the mind runs where introspection cannot follow. It ends with the old man's last year in Hampstead, and with the vocabulary he left in everybody's mouth.