Who was Martha Bernays, the Hamburg-born woman who, after a long and turbulent
engagement and against the opposition of her mother, married the Viennese doctor
Sigmund Freud and lived at his side for more than fifty years as wife and mother
of six? How did she feel, coming from a traditional Jewish family but living in
a household with no religious background? How did she cope with the challenge of
being married to the man whose work revolutionized our ways of thinking about
human sexuality?
In this, the first biography of Martha Freud, Katja Behling portrays this
remarkable woman, whose loyalty and steadfastness contributed in no