That Sigmund Freud became a major intellectual presence in twentieth-century…

That Sigmund Freud became a major intellectual presence in twentieth-century culture is not in doubt. 1 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 2 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 3 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 4 population.