ABSTRACT
In the close reading of the six-part BBC TV series Freud, with David Suchet in the title role, this chapter highlights the personal, haphazard, but creative and innovative origins of psychoanalysis. The author analysis demonstrates the dominance of ethical and professional dilemmas as the source of drama in the series. It highlights the series interrogation of the inevitable problems of transference and counter transference that come in any therapeutic encounter. The chapter argues that in Freud the primacy of analysis called scientific, professional, ethical, and theoretically informed therapeutic exchange is thoroughly challenged. The very plotting of the series narrative as a whole and its emphasis on the "enlightened friend" conversations. As the chapter sees in the relationship Freud enjoys with von Fleischl, Josef Breuer, and Wilhelm Fliess, and as Freud accounts for it to his daughter Anna in a vital conversation, therapeutic exchange is rendered as nothing more or less than a "conversation between enlightened friends".
