Israel Rosenfield

Freud's Megalomania

In a magical blending of historical fact and visionary fiction, Israel Rosenfield serves up for our scrutiny and sheer delight Freud's long-lost last "manuscript."
The key to Freud's legacy; a mysterious woman claiming to be the daughter of his illegitimate child; a conspiracy of silence surrounding the torture of war-torn soldiers; a modern scientist's lust to construct the ultimate robot, the Marilyn machine—these are just some of the intrigues that propel the narrative of this brilliant new novel. With a surprising twist on history and a playful challenge to today's enduring Freud debate, Israel Rosenfield reveals a Freud who in reflecting upon his life's work realizes that he has gotten it all wrong! Having realized that he has been a victim of his own self-delusion, Freud goes about setting the record straight with a preposterously seductive new theory of human behavior: it is not drives that define us but rather our boundless capacity to deceive ourselves. Such are the explosive contents of his last manuscript, Megalomania. Its discovery years later prompts a postmortem that effectively puts the icon to rest, resurrects the man, and exposes the naïvet? of Freud's disciples and the megalomaniacal tendencies of his detractors. Freud's Megalomania is a pure work of the imagination in which a fictional Freud is allowed to reinvent himself—and, oddly enough, is only then able to lay claim to his indisputable place in history.