On the Couch: Twenty Extraordinary Personalities, from Picasso to Putin

In the late 1800s, Sigmund Freud began to develop radical theories about sexuality, dreams and childhood experiences. Not only were his ideas revolutionary, but they also initiated a new discipline with various – often competing – schools of thought.

In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Jamieson unpacks ten of psychotherapy’s most profound principles and illuminates them through the biographies of twenty remarkable people. From Pablo Picasso’s chaotic life, which illustrates Freud’s concept of the unconscious, to the origins of Nelson Mandela’s compassion, which exemplify Carl Jung’s notion of individuation; from John Bowlby’s attachment theory, as seen through the lives of Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka, to Melanie Klein’s views on the relationship between love and hate, as revealed through the experiences of Cary Grant, On the Couch throws new light on the motivations and desires of some of our most memorable personalities.

Other lives examined include Josephine Baker, Nicolaus Copernicus, Charles Darwin, Viktor Frankl, Ernest Hemingway, Burt Hellinger, Emma Jung, Angela Merkel, Marilyn Monroe, Vladimir Putin, Ludwig Wittgenstein and W. B. Yeats.