BOOKS: Frink & Freud: The American Patient OUT 27th May

In 1909, while on a fundraising lecture tour in America, Sigmund Freud met Horace Frink, an early disciple of his theories of psychoanalysis, whose traumatic childhood and complicated personal life came to cast a dark shadow over Freud’s professional career.

Inspired by this little-known and ultimately tragic true story, author Pierre Péju and artist Lionel Richerand have woven a spellbinding and thought-provoking fable of modern history. The third in SelfMadeHero’s acclaimed “Graphic Freud” series, Frink & Freud focuses on his later reputation, and the personal costs and consequences that followed the dramatic collision – or collusion – between two of the 20th century’s greatest and most enduring inventions: Freud and America.

Philosopher, essayist, novelist, and critic Pierre Péju – whose debut graphic novel this is – describes as a “perfect orbit” his collaboration with artist-animator Lionel Richerand, whose range of vivid styles encapsulates the facts and fantasies, documents and dreams, fears and follies, that surround this truly extraordinary “true story”. Together, they have succeeded (perhaps better than even Freud himself ever did) in putting the American Dream on the psychoanalyst’s couch.

About the authors

Pierre Péju is a French philosopher, novelist, and essayist whose best-known works are the prizewinning novels Le rire de l’ogre and The Girl from the Chartreuse. French artist and animator Lionel Richerand studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, specializing in illustration and directing animated films. In 2007, he published Petit conte léguminesque, and later directed The Fear of the Wolf. This is their first collaboration.