An exceptionally insightful and humorous edition that explores the intertwined lives of psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, surgeon Wilfred Trotter, and the guru of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones was the closest collaborator and fervent student of Sigmund Freud. Intelligent, confident, and with strong ambition, he promoted psychoanalysis as a kind of secular religion. At the same time, his close friend Wilfred Trotter – a famous surgeon who saved the life of King George V and who took on Freud as a patient during his exile in London – refused to succumb to the tempting proposals of the new Freudianism. Trotter, essentially an Englishman, was not impressed by clever medical careerists, was skeptical of grand theories, and lacked pomp and self-admiration. From the first psychoanalytic congress in Salzburg in 1908 to King George's illness in the late 1920s and the meeting between Freud and Trotter in 1939, Seamus O'Mahony narrates the story of these three personalities and their intertwined lives with his usual wit and education. Not only a history of the development of psychoanalysis, this book addresses the sexual obsessions of intellectual and bohemian circles in London, Cambridge, and Vienna, Bloomsbury, and doctors seeking wealth and fame. It covers thirty defining years in European history and reveals how and why the writings of a failed neurologist from Vienna became so influential.