Egg All Over My Face

So I was wrong when I confidently declared, this last November, that British author and clinical psychologist Frank Tallis would debut an eighth entry in his wonderful Max Liebermann historical mystery series. In fact, that forthcoming book, now due out in March 2024 and titled Mortal Secrets (which echoes the name of Tallis’ first Lieberman novel, 2005’s Mortal Mischief), is to be a non-fiction work about Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, famous as the father of psychoanalysis. Here’s Amazon’s synopsis:

Mortal Secrets is a book constructed from intersecting stories. The story of a man (Freud), the story of a movement (psychoanalysis), the story of a city (Vienna) and the story of that city’s most colourful characters. Mortal Secrets is an introduction to psychoanalysis built around Freud’s biography and given cultural context by discussion of the revolutionary art, philosophy, and science of Vienna around 1900. It is both human and epic in scale, insofar as Vienna’s story of glamour and profligate brilliance was played out in coffee houses as well as battlefields. Most important of all, Mortal Secrets is an account of how we came to be who we are and why we live the way we do. It is the story of how Freud excavated and laid open the machinery of your mind. This is an entirely fresh approach to Freud. Existing biographies are largely slow-moving and most introductions to psychoanalysis lack depth. An intelligent book about Freud and psychoanalysis, written in an accessible and narrative style for the interested layperson, would be a unique reading experience. There has never been a book that both contextualises Freud in his time while offering a scientific evaluation of his ideas for our time.

It seems the wait for Lieberman’s next outing continues.