Author(s): Janine Burke

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Janine Burke, award-winning author and art historian, reveals an intriguing new perspective on sigmund Freud - as an obsessive art collector; a passionate and reckless man intent on surrounding himself with beautiful objects. Sigmund Freud's collection of Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities must be one of the world's best-kept secrets. Over a forty-year period he amassed an extraordinary array of nearly three thousand statues, vases, reliefs, busts, fragments of papyrus, rings, precious stones and prints. For Freud, psychoanalysis and his art collection developed together in a symbiotic relationship, each informing and enriching the other. To create a portrait of Freud the art collector, Janine Burke builds a vibrant, richly detailed and intimate image of his life and times, set against the glittering, decadent background of fin-de-si cle Vienna where an artistic flowering took place in painting, theatre, writing and architecture.