Freud's wife

"What do women want?" Sigmund Freud famously declared, yet Martha, his wife for over 50 years, has always received scant attention. Most biographies of Freud and psychoanalytic studies treat her as an early romantic interest and neglect her once she becomes a wife and mother. Still, if Freud's theories on everything from domesticity to sexuality were drawn partly from his own experience, Martha's personality and her interaction with her husband are significant to the history of psychoanalysis. Drawing on biographical, epistolary, and archival material, as well as Freud's own writings and the work of psychoanalytic commentators, the authors speculate on what roles Martha played and how Freud used her as a template upon which he based some of this theories about female behavior.