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Critical Praise for Vienna Triangle

• Brenda Webster has immersed herself in the lives and the sexual entanglements of an extraordinary set of people — Sigmund Freud, his family and disciples. From the artifacts they left behind (or that Webster has fashioned), her characters pose crucial questions about women, war, psychoanalysis — all the unavoidable conflicts of twentieth century life among the intelligentsia who shaped their time. Vienna Triangle is a fascinating set of speculations buttressed by facts as contradictory and incomplete and in need of imagining as is all history.

  — Rosellen Brown, author of Half a Heart, Before and After, and Civil Wars

• A riveting read, Brenda Webster's Vienna Triangle navigates between the late Sixties and fin de siecle Vienna in a dramatic exploration of family romances inside and outside the circle that so famously gathered around the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. The author makes brilliant use of fascinating historical material as her heroine, on a quest for self-discovery, investigates the intrigues that developed among the master's impassioned disciples - and their descendants.

  — Sandra M. Gilbert, author of Kissing the Bread (American Book Award), co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic: A Study of Women and the Literary Imagination in the Nineteenth Century

• Webster has written a hypnotic narrative about the grand project of psychoanalysis, now a hundred years old, and the coiled tensions between Freud and his gallery of disciples; about the clashing constraints of genius and personality and the intractable legacy of despair. . . . A fascinating exposure of both Freud's Inner Circle and the terra infirma of the human psyche. There is so much pure knowledge — knowledge about what it means to be human — embedded in these pages that one is torn between keeping up with the story's barreling pace and wanting to linger over the insights.

  — Lynn Stegner, author of Because a Fire Was in My in My Head (William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award) and Fata Morgana

Reviews

• A Tangled 'Vienna Triangle' . . . "offers a fascinating glimpse into the origins of the psychoanalytic movement."

  The San Francisco ChronicleJanuary 13, 2009

  Reviewed by Jeffrey Berman

  Brenda Webster's new novel, "Vienna Triangle," offers a fascinating glimpse into the origins of the psychoanalytic movement. She explores some of the most brilliant members of Sigmund Freud's inner circle of disciples, especially Viktor Tausk, whose tragic and unexpected suicide in 1918 continues to generate controversy among Freud's defenders and critics. Webster, who has published several acclaimed literary studies, novels and memoirs, including "The Last Good Freudian" (2000), combines her impressive knowledge of Freudian theory with a novelist's intuitive understanding of character and point of view.

  The novel's sympathetic heroine, Kate, is a 28-year old woman who is pursuing a graduate degree in psychology at Columbia and writing her dissertation on the early female psychoanalysts. As the story opens in the turbulent late 1960s, she meets an elderly Polish woman, Helene Rosenbach, who turns out to be Helene Deutsch, one of the most influential of the early Freudian psychoanalysts, famous (or infamous) for her theory of "penis envy" and women's innate masochism. While conducting her research, Kate makes an astonishing personal discovery, which she shares with Deutsch: Kate's mysterious grandfather, about whom her mother never talks,turns out to be Tausk. Part of the novel's achievement is that Kate's research into the early history of psychoanalysis parallels her deepening understanding of her own origins.

  No less than Kate, Webster has done her homework in researching historical psychoanalysts. We learn a great deal about the unstable Tausk, who had a deeply ambivalent relationship with Freud, as well as Freud himself, who despite his "heroic" self-analysis, comes across as a man who often borrowed others' ideas without acknowledgment, and who tolerated no dissent from his followers. We also learn about Lou Andreas-Salomé, who was infatuated not only with Freud but also with Nietzsche and Rilke.

  Webster offers us an accurate portrayal of these characters even as she invents the diaries, dialogues and secondary characters in the novel. Tausk's diary, which Kate stumbles across, seems so authentic that we may forget it is entirely fictional. The triangle in the title refers to the tangled Oedipal tensions in the novel, including Tausk-Andreas-Salomé-Freud and Tausk-Deutsch-Freud.

  "Vienna Triangle" will appeal to those who are familiar with the problematic history of the psychoanalytic movement as well as those who read literature for its insights into human character. Webster's characters are flawed human beings, and we care about them precisely because they are imperfect. Kate's observation about the early Freudians reflects the authorial point of view: "Being smart in the head doesn't mean they have emotional understanding." Or as Kate's mother, angry that her father had never married her mother, generalizes more judgmentally, "I'd wager that the mind doctors are just as blind as anyone else and may be more dangerous because they claim superior wisdom."

  Freud, threatened by his defectors, saw betrayal everywhere, a self-fulfilling perception. More interested in discovering universal psychological truths than in trying to empathize with his patients, he often misread the motives of friends and foes alike.

  "Freud had cast Tausk as Oedipus, the potential father-killer," Kate theorizes, with Webster's approval. "Once he'd done that, it was easy to misinterpret anything Tausk did." Was Tausk a loyal defender of Freud or an aggressive rival? This is one of the many intriguing questions Webster raises. After reading the novel, one believes that Freud was implicated in Tausk's suicide, a conclusion that Paul Roazen also reaches in his book "Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk," which Webster acknowledges in the afterword.

  The novelist clearly favors those characters who grow and learn from experience, who revise earlier interpretations and who develop compassion and humility, such as Deutsch, who states, "the older I get, the less I think I know, really know." Older and wiser, she also speaks in an authorial voice when she tells Kate that she must not be too harsh on the creator of psychoanalysis: "It's hard to feel now the power Freud had over his group  some might even say the power of life or death." Believing less and less in insight, Deutsch speaks for her creator when she observes wryly, "It's hard to get things right. In fact, it's almost impossible."

  Webster succeeds in conveying Freud's power over his disciples while at the same time showing the unintended consequences of his actions.

  ————

  Jeffrey Berman is a Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Albany.

• 5-STAR AMAZON.COM REVIEW

  www.amazon.com

  Historical fiction is usually expected to be something along the lines of a war epic with a multitude of characters as opposed to a novel as thought-provoking and insightful as Vienna Triangle. This account of Sigmund Freud's inner circle during the early part of the 20th century is depicted through the lens of 1960's America, two similarly tumultuous eras. The viewpoint characters, one who actually lived through both periods, establish a rapport that enable the reader to better comprehend the progress made in terms of feminist principles, psychotherapy, activist politics, tolerance of non-conformity and artistic expression. This book is such a beautifully balanced blend of romance, psychology and history that I actually wanted it to be lengthier. The implementation of the diary excerpts of the narrative was especially skillful.

• From Publishers Weekly Online

  Publishers Weekly OnlineFebruary 17, 2009

  Webster's fourth novel is an involving, if overly mannered, literary mystery centered around an ambitious young woman's unknown ancestry, the love life of Sigmund Freud and the death of Freud's rival, Viktor Tausk. A chance run-in with legendary psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, once a member of Freuds inner circle, sends young American scholar Kate Berg on a journey to uncover the familial roots her mom has long kept hidden. Through Helene, Kate discovers secrets that tie Freud to her long-lost grandfather; the chaotic story of Freud, Tausk and their fight over the alluring Lou Andreas-Salomé, unreels with the Vietnam War raging in the background, immersing Kate and readers in two generations of love and loss. Both smart and charming, Webster's latest delves into the history of psychology with sordid details and a surprising conclusion, in which Kate may lose more than she gains. (Jan.)

• Psychoanalytic Fictions

  Laura González BlogJanuary 29, 2009

  Please read the full review here: http://lauragonzalez.co.uk/2009/01/29/psychoanalytic-fictions/

• Women's National Book Association April Spotlight on Brenda Webster
  Bookworm Interview

  BookwormApril 2009

  Brenda Webster is a freelance writer, critic, and translator and the current president of PEN West. Webster has written two controversial and oft-anthologized critical studies, Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study (Stanford), Blake's Prophetic Psychology (Macmillan) and edited the journals of the abstract expressionist painter (and Webster's mother) Ethel Schwabacher, Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher (Indiana). She is the author of three previous novels, Sins of the Mothers (Baskerville, 1993) and Paradise Farm (SUNY, 1999), The Beheading Game WINGS Press and a memoir, The Last Good Freudian (Holmes and Meier, 2000). Webster's translation of Edith Bruck's Holocaust novel Lettera alla Madre came out in 2007. Her new novel, Vienna Triangle (WINGS Press 2009) explores Freud's role in the death of his brilliant disciple, Viktor Tausk.

  Webster has been nominated for two 26th Annual 2007 Northern California Book Awards. Fiction: The Beheading Game and Translation: Letter to My Mother by Edith Bruck

  1) When did you start writing?

  I started writing in 6th grade. Up 'till then I wanted to be a painter like my mother. I was entranced by the bulls, lilies, peacocks and fruit trees that seemed to burst effortlessly from the tip of her brush. But in 6th grade, I realized that I wasn't getting any better. I turned to words and began to paint with them, describing natural scenes or horsesmy passion at the time. By High School I knew I wanted to be a writer and was chosen editor of our literary magazine. My mother drew my portrait for the first issue.

  2) Why did you choose your particular genre?

  I think my genre chose me. I soon tired of writing brief descriptions of sunsets and began to write stories. Then in Freshman year in high school, my father died and for the next four years I wrote nothing but poetry. I didn't get back to fiction until I married and wrote an autobiographical novel.

  3) What inspired you to choose your subject matter?

  I wanted to describe the effects of my father's death on my life and I planned to give it to my new husband as a gift. A rather strange idea in retrospect.

  4) How difficult/easy has your experience been as a published writer?

  Well, the first two novels were never published despite some very positive feed back from editors at major houses, including one from Christopher Lehman-Haupt saying that my book had "great humanity" but was "too quiet to sell." I think my problem was that I hadn't learned that re-writing is crucial and not even my agent wanted to tell me. So I was discouraged and turned to writing psychoanalytic literary criticism for many years. Finally after three children and a divorce and re-marriage, I turned back to fiction and worked my way up from xeroxed magazines to excellent literary journals. Getting a commercial press is always difficult for literary fiction and I think I have had a different publisher for every book but Ive always found one and Im very very happy with Wings Press for my new novel, Vienna Triangle.

  5) What advice would you give other aspiring authors?

  It depends what they want. But I guess the main thing is to read as much as they can of things they admire and then to write and re-write until your book or story is as perfect as you can make it. And dont let rejections get you down.

  6) Anything else you would like to share with the WNBA?

  Talent is crucial but persistence is half of the battle.

• New PagesApril 1, 2009

  Brenda Webster's new novel, Vienna Triangle, employs the historical context of the early psychoanalysis movement to create a mystery that explores the dark side of intellectual enlightenment. Using Freud and his inner circle as case studies, she investigates the rise of egoism and the tension of professional ambition within the group. Like most historical fiction that focuses on intellectual movements and figures, Vienna Triangle, plays largely on the relationship between ideology and character that exists whenever you have someone trying to change our cultural perspective.

  The plot is driven by the young graduate student, Kate, who conducts her research like an archaeological detective. Motivated by both professional ambition and personal longing, she digs into the circumstances surrounding the death of Viktor Tausk, Freud's loyal but disgruntled disciple. As Kate sifts through Tausk's professional papers and private journals, she finds herself becoming entangled in the movement's infighting -- quickly developing her own set of personal loyalties.

  When she meets Helen, a pioneer as an analyst and as a female professional in the nineteen thirties, she is finally able to shine light in the darker corners of the movement's beginnings. However, the practicality of Helen's careerism and marital relationship counters and questions the idealistic feminism that Kate had hoped to apply to her own life. As the pieces to her historical puzzle fall into place, Kate's own life becomes a juggling act between career, self and family -- an act very similar to the ones she had uncovered in the young analysts.

  As the underlying relationships and rivalries of the group are exposed, questions of intellectual integrity and personal loyalty grow into a truly scandalous set of entanglements -- entanglements that threaten to change the very way we view both man and movement. Webster takes a close look at how the image of genius is formed and how it is never a true reflection of reality. As the father of psychoanalysis, Freud needed not only ideas but followers, "to corroborate his findings, and of course [with them] he shone, he stood out like a giant among pygmies." Webster plays on this struggle within the group dynamic, pitting the individual personalities that also had a need to shine against the confines of the group and the teachings of the guru.

  Soon the movement's need for followers conflicts with its need for intellectual objectivity, leaving Kate and the reader to question its scientific roots: "For a supposedly rational science there was a lot of passionate feeling going around. Sometimes it seems more like a religious sect than a rational science." Webster brings the destruction caused by an unwavering belief in rationality to the personal lives of her characters, illustrating that the dangers of the true believer can reach deep into science.

  As the mystery of the movement is being laid to rest, a state of suspense builds over whether Kate can learn the lessons of history and avoid the same pitfalls of intellectual ambition that befell her predecessors. Kate's emerging struggle, eerily similar to those facing the analysts of her grandfather's generation, encapsulates the inherent weakness of human ambition exposed in Vienna Triangle.

• San Antonio Express-NewsMay 3, 2009

  As in her previous three novels, Brenda Webster brings to the fore the complicated and compelling entanglements of the study of Freudian psychology in Vienna Triangle, newly published by San Antonio's Wings Press.

  In fact, this latest work encompasses the entire psychoanalytic movement, replete with the depictions of the daily lives and travails of Freud and his closest colleagues and protègès.

  In particular, we learn in greater detail of the fascinating life of Victor Tausk, who is, it seems, Freud's greatest defender and rival. Tausk's suicide in 1918 is at the center of the Vienna Triangle of the title. It is a death that continues to elicit confusion and controversy.

  Confusion and controversy plague Kate Berg, the novel's protagonist, who pursues a graduate degree in psychology at Columbia University during the turbulent 1960s.Her dissertation has to do with the female psychoanalysts who blazed a trail alongside Freud. Her research takes her by pure happenstance to an elderly Polish woman named Helene Rosenbach, whose maiden name is Deutsch. Helene Deutsch enjoyed some notoriety for her theory of penis envy and the supposed innate masochism she theorized women possess. Helene, it turns out, will be an invaluable font of information for Kate.

  During her research, Kate discovers that her grandfather -- a man her mother refused to discuss -- is Victor Tausk. We learn Tausk was a highly intelligent man who may have proposed the storied theories we have come to assign to Freud. Tausk admired Freud and was subordinate to him in their circle of colleagues, but he also, it seems, detested him. Both men -- both married men -- had designs on the same woman, Lou Andreas-SalomÈ, known also in history for her love affairs with Nietzsche and Rilke.

  The triangle of the title refers to the relationships Salomé develops with Tausk and Freud. We learn about the tensions right along with Kate as she reads the words of Tausk in diaries she finds among her mother's things.

  Through Kate we deconstruct ideas about women, men, sex, war and human behavior. That's some heavy lifting. But we don't even realize we're doing it.

  Vienna Triangle might be called a "literary mystery." While Kate digs, tensions rise. Suspense builds. But Webster also wears the hat of a historian and a psychologist. This is a mesmerizing narrative that weaves psychoanalysis, biography, romance and intrigue.

  ________ Reviewed by Yvette Benavides, Dept. of English, Our Lady of the Lake University

• "A compelling read"

  Historical Novels ReviewMay 2009

  Vienna Triangle is not a mathematical puzzle but a complex human one. The novel opens in 1968 with Helene Deutsch, the first female psychotherapist and one of the last survivors of Freud's circle, meeting a new neighbor literally by accident. Emily Berg stumbles to the ground while walking, and Helene helps her home and meets Kate, Emily's budding feminist daughter and an earnest psychology student researching women in early psychotherapy. Meeting her idol, Helene, in the flesh, Kate begs a chance to mine Helene's memories of the early Freudian circle. A modern triangle forms, as Kate delves into her own past against her mother's wishes and uncovers a diary which, paired with Helene's remembrances, gives her myriad insights that no span of psychotherapy treatment could have unearthed. Helen confirms events in the diary of the various triangles of influence involving Freud, Helene, and the ubiquitous intellectual temptress, Lou-Andreas Salomé, and their effect on intense, star-crossed acolyte Viktor Tausk, the diary's author. Were there enough neuroses in the Freud "family" alone to supply the annals of psychotherapy? Did each work out their jealousies and fears on one another, eventually leading to dissent and disaster?

  This is a compelling read for those who crave insights into human behavior and early psychotherapy, but also an enjoyable read as Webster blends fact with her seamless fiction to create a satisfying portrait of two major upheavals in 20th-century history: the human timeline of Freudian "bombshells" and the social revolution of the turbulent Sixties.

  Reviewed by Tess Allegra