"Freud Through the Looking-Glass" features a collection of photographs by Leslie Hossack. This book explores Dr. Sigmund Freud’s pre-war Vienna, Hitler’s wartime Vienna, letters handwritten by Freud, books from The Pelican Freud Library, as well as art works and self-reflections captured by the artist through the lens of “Freud’s looking-glass.”

For almost 50 years, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, lived and worked at number 19 Berggasse in Vienna. Hossack writes: “On each of my visits to his office, I searched for items that Freud had actually touched, relics that contained his DNA... Freud’s clinical methods have been questioned, his academic theories discredited and his personal conduct criticized. However, his concepts continue to shape our thinking and colour our conversations today. We talk knowingly about the id, the ego and the superego; the Oedipus complex and the death wish; female and infantile sexuality; the conscious, subconscious and unconscious; and of course, the Freudian slip. We are all Freudians.”

In addition to more than 80 colour photographs, "Freud Through the Looking-Glass" contains: an insightful foreword by Dr. Stefan Pehringer, Austrian ambassador to Canada; an informative essay by Dr. Anja N. Caspary; a chronology of Freud’s life; a list of further readings; and writings by the artist.

The Freud Photographs are part of Hossack’s larger body of work that explores Hitler’s Berlin, Stalin’s Moscow, Churchill’s London, the D-Day landing beaches of Normandy, the Japanese Canadian experience during World War II, contested sites in Jerusalem, the NATO Headquarter Camp in Kosovo, and a Cold War bunker in Ottawa.
ISBN: 978-0-9868617-7-2