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A few years after Austria's disastrous defeat in the First World War, Vienna, a city hardly known for intellectual fervor or serious discourse, suddenly emerged as a mecca for psychology. At a time seemingly most unpropitious for scholarly speculation, interbellum Vienna, economically and spiritually bankrupt at its onset, enjoyed a brief, remarkable two decades of excellence and innovation in an unfamiliar realm, that of abstract ideas. The most notable beneficiary of this intellectual Zeitgeist was the field of psychology; Viennese psychology became famous and its gurus and gadflies became world figures.

This is the first book to present that history within the context of the political and social events of the time. Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Karl Buhler, Erik Erikson, and Helene Deutsch were among the hundreds of famous psychologists who lived in Vienna and established training centers there. Not only were the historical events momentous, but Vienna's psychologists were often politically active and subversive. Since a majority of them were socialist and Jewish, Vienna's leading psychologists emigrated when Austria was annexed by Germany, abruptly ending the Golden Age.