Hysterical

A brilliant, haunting work of literary and historical fiction, Hysterical: Anna Freud's Story reimagines the extraordinary-and often overlooked-life of Anna Freud, the youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud.

Imagine growing up smart, ambitious, and queer in a home where your father, Sigmund Freud, thinks that women should aspire to be wives and calls lesbianism a gateway to mental illness. He also says that lesbianism is always caused by the father, and is usually curable by psychoanalysis.

Then he analyzes you.

Ultimately, Anna Freud loved Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham (heir to the Tiffany fortune) for 54 years. They raised a family together and became psychoanalysts in their own right, specializing in child therapy. But first, Anna had to navigate childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood in a famous family where her kind of romantic longings were considered dangerous.

What was it like to grow up the lesbian daughter of "the great Sigmund Freud"? Aside from Anna's sexuality and from her father's intrusive psychoanalysis of her, what were the Freud family's most closely closeted skeletons? What is it about the birth of psychoanalysis that even today's psychoanalysts would prefer to keep secret? How did Anna defy her father so thoroughly while continuing to love him and learn from him?

Weaving a grand tale out of a pile of crazy facts, Hysterical: Anna Freud's Story lets the pioneering child psychologist freely examine the forces that shaped her life.

Moving, sharply observed, and deeply feminist, Hysterical will resonate with readers of literary historical fiction, biographical fiction, women's fiction, and stories about women in psychology, early 20th-century Europe, and complex family dynamics. It is a compelling narrative about power, identity, survival, and the hidden histories of women whose lives shaped modern thought.

Perfect for readers of Maggie O'Farrell, Paula McLain, and Geraldine Brooks.