'Joel Whitebook presents to us an extraordinary new biography of Freud. In contrast to the classical biographies he is in a position to use our current psychoanalytic knowledge on the early development of the child and the early mother-child relationship to show the development of Freud’s personality and his theoretical work in a new light. The missing of the maternal dimension in the unfolding of his ideas was one of the most important consequences of Freud’s early traumatic experiences for his thinking. With his profound psychoanalytic and philosophical knowledge, great empathy and integrative strength Whitebook brilliantly describes the central motifs, the creative ways and also the wrong tracks in the development of Freud’s theoretical thinking, confronting it with critical issues in contemporary psychoanalysis and philosophy … His book is a masterpiece.' Werner Bohleber, author of Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis and editor of Psyche