Often referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis," Sigmund Freud championed the "talking cure" and charted the human unconscious. But though Freud compared himself to Copernicus and Darwin, his history as a physician is problematic. Historians have determined that Freud often misrepresented the course and outcome of his treatments—so that the facts would match his theories. Today Freud's legacy is in dispute, his commentators polarized into two camps: one of defenders; the other, fierce detractors.

Peter D. Kramer, himself a practicing psychiatrist and a leading national authority on mental health, offers a new take on this controversial figure, one both critical and sympathetic. He recognizes that although much of Freud's thought is now archaic, the discipline he invented has become an inescapable part of our culture, transforming the way we see ourselves. Freud was a myth-maker, a storyteller, a writer whose books will survive among the classics of our literature. The result of Kramer's inquiry is nothing less than a new standard history of Freud by a modern master of his thought.

In 1922, a distraught husband framed a challenge for Sigmund Freud: "Great Doctor, are you savant or charlatan?" Though he had interviewed her only briefly, Freud had advised the man's wife to leave him and marry her former analyst, a patient and protégé of Freud's. The injured party, Abraham Bijur, was a person of means. He intended to make his grievance public in the New York Times. But Bijur died just after the letter was composed. Nearly seven decades would pass before its contents were shared with the Times's readers.

For most of those years, Freud was very much Bijur's "savant"—a towering intellectual figure. He was, to begin with, the greatest psychiatrist of the age. He appeared to possess special powers of observation that allowed him to turn his work with patients into innovative science. Using methods he had himself developed, Freud had discovered and mapped the unconscious. He had named the components of the mind and explored the principles by which they operated. He had charted the sequence of human psychological growth, from infancy to mature adulthood. He had identified the causes of most mental illnesses and invented a method for treating them.

Freud was more than the parfit physician. He was also a wise man, whose account of the diseased mind had profound implications for our understanding of the human condition. Beneath apparent rationality, Freud had discerned dark impulses and contradictory yearnings that coalesced into predictable patterns he called complexes. He had demonstrated that, in the culture and in the lives of individuals, hidden symbols abound; our customs and behaviors simultaneously hide and reveal sexual and aggressive drives incompatible with the requirements of civilized society. Freud's theories seemed to update ancient philosophies, casting our lives as tragic dramas of a distinctively modern sort. It was as if, before Freud, we had never known ourselves.

Then, a quarter of a century ago, Freud's status began to change. Forgotten documents came to light. They showed that Freud had regularly misrepresented the development of his ideas and the details of his own life story. The new understanding of Freud's clinical work was particularly troubling. He had altered fact to fit theory, conducted therapies in ways that bore scant relationship to his precepts, and claimed success in treatments that had failed. How damaging were these findings, in light of Freud's contributions? The answer to that question might depend in part on the status of Freud's ideas, which were themselves falling from favor. Freud's supporters and his detractors took opposing positions, in the controversy known as "the Freud Wars." Bijur's challenge moved to center stage: savant or charlatan?

The case that so pained Abraham Bijur contributed to the reassessment. Bijur, a financier, was married to a younger woman, Angelika, who was wealthy in her own right. Angelika Bijur had entered into a sexual relationship with her former analyst, the prominent American psychiatrist Horace Frink.

Frink was married, with two young children. He had long been prone to mood disorder, and in the course of the affair, he became emotionally disturbed. Uncertain how to proceed, Frink traveled to Vienna at Angelika Bijur's expense to undertake a course of analysis with Freud.

Frink had a difficult history. When he was eight, his father suffered a business failure. The father moved in search of work, taking his wife with him and leaving Frink in the care of grandparents. When Frink was fifteen, his mother died of tuberculosis. In his mid-twenties, Frink succumbed to depression. Despite psychoanalytic treatment, he became depressed again in his thirties....

Peter D. Kramer, called "America's best-known psychiatrist" by the New York Times, is the bestselling author of Listening to Prozac, Should You Leave?, Spectacular Happiness, Moments of Engagement, and, most recently, Against Depression. He has also contributed to the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the London Times Literary Supplement, and U.S. News & World Report, among other publications. Dr. Kramer lives and practices in Providence, Rhode Island, where he is a professor at Brown University.