As a writer, Sigmund Freud has affected powerful views on women. No one has been so vilified, both for his theories of the feminine, and for his alleged elevation of personal prejudice to the level of universality. Libertarian, old-fashioned moralist, Victorian patriarch, prophet of polymorphous perversity - these are only some of the charges leveled against Freud. Pitting biography against case history, mining correspondence and journals, and interlacing Freud"s own dreams and fantasies, this book tells the many stories of the extraodinary women who touched Freud"s life: from his daughter Anna (his Antigone) to the socialist/feminist Helene Deutsch; from the writer and femme fatale Lou Andreas Salome to Princess Marie Bonaparte, who moved from couch to royal court with amazing facility and became head of the French psychoanalytic movement. The book explores how these relationships influenced Freud"s ideas, and traces their legacy in contemporary feminism. Lisa Appignanesi is the author of "Memory and Desire and Cabaret: The First Hundred Years". John Forrester is the author of "Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis" and "The Seductions of Psychoanalysis".