Edited by Cilly Kugelmann, Nicola Lepp and Daniel Tyradellis

168 pages,
Four-color throughout, with transparent pages
with over 100 illustrations
+ radio drama on CD

Nicolai Verlag Berlin
24.90 euros

In 2006 the creator of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, would have turned 150. An appropriate occasion to dedicate an unusual project to him and his invention.

The book accompanying the exhibition in the Jewish Museum Berlin offers an amusing and pointed portrayal of the present of psychoanalysis from various perspectives.

The book is organized around central basic psychoanalytical concepts like perversion, psychosis and phobia. The everyday world of things from Freud's most famous case histories - drill, bouquet and bathtub - makes the concepts astonishingly clear and comprehensible.

The basic concepts are flanked by articles by internationally renowned scientists. The psychoanalyst Peter Widmer looks into the role of the voice in psychoanalysis; the historian Eli Zaretsky investigates the influence of psychoanalysis on Jewish history; the film scholar Gertrud Koch pursues the depiction of psychoanalysis in cinema; the psychoanalyst Karl-Josef Pazzini reflects upon the role of a missing thing - in psychoanalysis and in the museum. A genealogy, more complete than any existing to date, provides information about the fate of the Freud family.

The volume is introduced with an essay by the exhibition curators, which deals with the setting of psychoanalytic treatment - armchair and couch - and with the space of love and law institutionalized by this setting.

The catalog includes a CD with an experimental radio drama on Freud's life.