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Mortal Secrets

Freud, Vienna and the Discovery of the Modern Mind

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Mortal Secrets

By: Frank Tallis
Narrated by: Simon Shepherd
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About this listen

 Like Sarah Bakewell's How to Live and Andrea Wulf's Magnificent Rebels, Mortal Secrets is a lively and accessible portrait of a major figure - Sigmund Freud - and the unprecedented era of creativity that shaped his ideas

Some cities are like stars. When the conditions are right, they ignite, and they burn with such fierce intensity that they outshine all their rivals. From 1890 and through the early years of the 20th century, Vienna became a dazzling beacon. The city was powered by an unprecedented number of extraordinary people - artists Klimt and Schiele, thinkers such as Theodor Herzl, and fashion icons like the glamorous Empress Sisi. Conversations in coffee houses and salons spurred advances in almost every area of human endeavour: science, politics, philosophy, and the arts. The influence of early 20th century Vienna is still detectable all around us - but the place where it is at its strongest is in our heads. The way we think about ourselves has been largely determined by Vienna's most celebrated resident: Sigmund Freud. Mortal Secrets is the story of Freud's life, Vienna's golden age, and an essential reappraisal of Freud's legacy. Europe Professionals & Academics Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Social Scientists & Psychologists Colonial Period

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Critic reviews

Brilliantly rich and vivid
Fascinating... the best book I have read on Freud and Vienna. Lucid, sceptical, sagacious, it perfectly explains how we are all, like it or not, Freudians now
Frank Tallis's lucid storytelling makes him an ideal guide in this dangerous but perennially exciting terrain
Tallis makes Freud's life and the lost world of Viennese society vividly comprehensible. Excellent and entertaining
An unusually well-balanced and remarkably fresh account of Freud's life and work - in historical and cultural context - viewed from the perspective of our own troubled times, and with contemporary scientific hindsight
Convincingly critical and convincingly admiring-among the best of innumerable Freud bios... Tallis provides an expert portrait of a brilliant, obsessive, ruthless figure
Takes a wide-ranging and fascinating look at how Sigmund Freud shaped and was shaped by the cultural ferment of late 19th- and early 20th-century Vienna... Stunning in its breadth and depth, this is a magisterial treatment of a towering thinker
[A] wonderful biography... Tallis attempts to redeem Freud's "modernity" by considering him not so much as a scientist but as an artist and a product of the weird and gorgeous bloom of creativity and neurosis that flowered in the last decades of Habsburg Vienna (James Marriott)
An accessible, fluent introduction to Freud's life and work... Tallis's book moves crisply between biographical scenes, snapshots of Vienna's golden age, retellings of Freud's significant case histories, and well-crafted summaries of Freud's principal theories
Tallis' clear-eyed judicious analysis is the best I've read - about the city and the man
All stars
Most relevant
This is a long overdue re-examination of the scale of Frued's achievement. Whilst refusing to duck Frued's considerable flaws and some of his questionable practices, - who now would defend a psychotherapist psychoanalysing his/her own daughter, - he outlines Frued's impact on the modern world. An impact far greater than many of the major 20th century 'isms' and his uncanny ability to understand the maliase at the heart of civilisation. A towering narrative touching upon everything from Ancient Egyptian mythology to entropy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics. A book for our time.

Frued Reappraised

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Clear unjargoned, well written and read. Good understandable summaries of Freud's work, deeply researched history. humorous

Freud's relevance today

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The last chapters were excellent. His early life was interesting and the descriptions of the artists and literature of Vienna from the War in q914 to the rise of antisemitism

we got fed up with the repetitive allusions to love and death

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