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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week, my guest is Mikhail Bork-Yacobson, who's the professor of comparative literature at the University of Washington, and an expert in the history of psychoanalysis.

Now, his new book is a fascinating investigation called Freud's Patience, a Book of Lives, in which he's gone and found out who those anonymised or pseudonymous people in Freud's case notes were and put real names and real stories to them. Mikhail, welcome.

This is a gripping investigation and obviously some considerable detected work has gone into it.

But has this never been done before?

It seems such an obvious thing to do.

Not really.

You've had many, many books about individual patients,

ANO, the rat man, the wolfman, and so forth.

But you never had a really exhaustive investigation into all the other patients that Freud treated.

He published basically about 10 case histories, which is a very small number of case histories

for, you know, to build a theory on 10 cases, it's a little far-fetched. But so the idea behind

my book was to study all the patients that I could find and identify.

And indeed, many of them had already been identified by Freud scholars before, but I've added a few ones and basically made a compilation of all these

cases. And I should add that I selected these patients as patients to say, I didn't include in my

anthology of patients, all the people who went to see Freud because they were interested

in the theories or because they wanted to become analysts themselves. They wanted to be trained.

I stuck to patients who came to see Freud with a clear therapeutic request.

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