Mental Healers: Mesmer, Eddy and Freud

Stefan's Zweig Mental Healers is a triple biography of Franz Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy and Sigmund Freud, three influential thinkers who travelled very different paths in their search for the crucial link between mind and body.

Stefan Zweig's brilliant study explores the lives and work of these important figures, raising provocative questions regarding the efficacy and even the morality of their methods.

An insight into the minds of three key thinkers who shaped the philosophy of our age, Stefan Zweig'sMental Healers is a wonderfully intriguing and thought-provoking biographical work from a renowned master of the genre.

Mental Healers is translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul and published by Pushkin Press

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a translator and later as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.