While doing so, I was not overly concerned with whether I believed or disbelieved his theories concerning the workings of the human mind. Freud, for whatever merit (or lack there of) his theories have, is a terrific writer with a real flair for the dramatic and the unexpected. The book Three Case Histories was one that took hold of my imagination. It offers case histories of “The Wolf Man,” “The Rat Man,” and “The Psychotic Doctor Schreber.” All three of these cases are broken down into the same structure. First, the “problem” is presented (or the individual’s mania and how it manifests itself), and then Freud lays out his analysis. The funny thing is that the analysis, in its reasoning, is often more bizarre than the strangeness of the given patient’s condition. In “The Woman Who Counts Her Breath,” I applied Freud’s structure to the investigation of a character’s personality. One thing Freud was definitely right about is that there are always mitigating circumstances, powerful forces from our early lives that have made us what we are.
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