Reading and writing fill in the blanks
That Sigmund Freud became a major intellectual presence in twentieth-century culture is not in doubt. is there any doubt that at all times there was both fervent enthusiasm over and bitter hostility to his ideas and influence. But the exact means Freud became, despite this hostility, a master of intellectual life, on a par, already in the 1920s, with Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Bertrand Russell, has not been sufficiently explored. Strikingly, Freud emerged as a twentieth-century icon without the endorsement and support of an institution or a profession (in contrast to Einstein, Curie and Russell). Where are we to look for the details of this story of an emergent - and new - figure of immense cultural authority? One of the principal aims of this book is to show how this happened in one local, parochial yet privileged, site - Cambridge, then as now a university town stranded in the English Fens with a relatively small population.