The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic: A story of science, sex and psychoanalysis

An ingenious and witty book about the intertwined fates of psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, surgeon Wilfred Trotter and psychoanalysis guru Sigmund Freud

The intelligent, self-confident and extremely ambitious Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones was Sigmund Freud's closest associate and most ardent disciple. Jones promoted psychoanalysis as a kind of secular religion. Meanwhile, his sister's husband Wilfred Trotter - the famous surgeon who saved the life of George V and became Freud's doctor during his London exile - did not succumb to the charms of Freudism. He did not accept the clever careerists from medicine, did not trust grandiose theories, was devoid of arrogance and narcissism, which acted as a kind of "vaccine" against Freud.

From the first psychoanalytic congress in Salzburg to King George's illness and Freud and Trotter's first meeting, Seamus O'Mahony not only tells the story of three remarkable figures, but also reveals all the secrets of the sexual obsessions of the intellectual and bohemian circles of London, Cambridge and Vienna. The Guru, the Accomplice and the Skeptic covers thirty crucial years of European history, during which the failed Viennese neuropathologist who gained global influence worked.