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 small measure to the extraordinary success of psychoanalysis as it went from strength to strength and spread from Vienna to the four corners of the earth.