Freud's Mistress A Book Review

The wife always knows.

How she reacts to the realization that the cold front at home changes to a warm current in another woman’s arms is the crux of the novel, Freud’s Mistress by Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman.

Martha Freud is a harried mother of six and the wife of Dr. Sigmund Freud an unapparelled egomaniac shunned by the medical profession for his views on dreams and sexuality. His woes are compounded by being a Jew around 1900’s, in a Vienna where anti-Semitic Nazis are knocking on the population’s consciousness and doors open to embrace them.

It is a bi-polar book, if we could be so bold as to liken it to bi-polar disorder, the mental illness associated with wealthy women.  Bi-polar, because in addition to how Martha Freud manages her husband’s infidelity, it is a highly academic novel that needs the reader to know who Sigmund Freud was. 

His theories on psychoanalysis and his interpretation of the Oedipus complex in particular, are still fodder for academic and medical debate.  The reader should also have an inkling about Oscar Wilde, the Alfred Dreyfuss Affair, and other personalities that made news at the time.

The first steps into the book are deceptive.  They give the impression that Martha Freud is a helpless woman whose blandness pushed Freud into another woman’s arms because she is too preoccupied with the children, the kitchen, fear of disease and trying to fit in high Vienna society, leaving no time to support her brilliant husband.

Her younger sister Minna Bernays does.  She is a book addict, especially academic books.  That is why she enjoys her brother in law’s company.  They flirt from book to book, like bees on a rose bush.  Martha Freud shrugs it off and tells her sister that her husband enjoys an audience. William Shakespeare is often the source of sparring between Minna Bernays and Freud.

“As he handed her the slim volume, he told her he was now convinced that Shakespeare was a fraud and Edward de Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the great Bard’s works.” P. 253.

That is the academic side of the bi-polar.  The intriguing side is the women’s part.  It is stand-alone storytelling that ordinary readers with no college degrees will relate to.

Minna is riddled with guilt that she is sleeping with her sister’s husband.  At the same time, she falls for the: my wife doesn’t understand me lie and regards herself superior because she can quote Goethe, Plato or Socrates, drink whiskey, snort cocaine and smoke cigarettes with Freud.

This side of the bi-polar is more intriguing because it is not bogged down by facts, history, places, literature etc.  The writing is fluid but taxing emotionally, with readers struggling like mountain climbers, trying to understand the enigma that is Martha Freud. 

Mountain climbing is even easier, try counting lint on a jacket. Readers can find the lint in this page or that page, if they approach the book on a clean state, with no preconceived notion on how wives with cheating husbands are expected to react.

Reading Freud’s Mistress is hard work because it makes readers work (read carefully), a welcome departure from books with the tried and tested ending.  Freud’s name is in the title, but the book is not about him. 

Patience is advised during this exploration.  It will be well rewarded.