On the Couch: Writers Analyze Sigmund Freud review

Authors reassess the legacy of the father of psychotherapy in a lovely grab bag of essays

Spare a thought for Ida Bauer. The 17-year-old came to Freud’s consulting room with a host of symptoms – fainting fits, pains, hoarse cough, breathlessness. She told Freud her dad’s friend Herr K had tried to seduce her from the age of 13. Possibly K’s advances, for which she once understandably slapped him, were erotic payback for her father having an affair with Herr K’s wife.

Freud disagreed, arguing that, really, she wanted to be seduced by Herr K – and by her therapist too. Unsurprisingly, she terminated Freud’s therapy after three months. “Talk about unexamined projection!” writes the cartoonist and editor Sarah Boxer in the first essay in this often droll and always engaging collection, arguing that his treatment of Ida was: “Ground zero for ‘No means yes.’”