SIGMUND FREUD (Touchstone Books)

First paperback edition of this Ralph Steadman classic. Bursting defiantly and gleefully beyond the bounds of orthodox biography, Sigmund Freud is a wildly humorous exercise in bending, stretching and speculating on the activities of the so-called Father of Psychoanalysis. Ralph Steadman wields his shrewd wit and fierce pen to highlight the movements of Freud's life and career, from early childhood to the moment of death. But there's a twist. Through a masterful interplay of text and illustration, each scene is transformed into a "joking situation," which the artist hilariously examines according to the techniques discussed by Freud himself in his 1905 book, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. The result is a fantastic Freudian festival of visual and verbal puns, unexpected insights, and sheer intellectual enjoyment. Sigmund Freud is superbly illustrated with more than 50 major drawings and 25 vignettes. It remains one of the most original illustrated books of our times and a Ralph Steadman classic. 118 pages with index.