In analyzing one of his own dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud alludes to Rider Haggard's She, `A strange book, but full of hidden meaning,' where `the eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions' is explored; and where the guide on `an adventurous road that had scarcely ever been trodden before, leading into an undiscovered region' is a woman. She becomes for Freud here an analogy for his own dream book, his charting of the perilous royal road to the undiscovered region of the unconscious and its `ultimate explanations'- the science of psychoanalysis.[1] Freud's guide, too, we can infer, is a woman. Indeed women - whether family, patients or friends - were to serve as Freud's guides and much besides throughout his life. And after his death, they have continued to be at once vexed and fascinated at the mirror he held up to them, as well as his reflection within it.

Writing Freud's Women has been something of an adventure for us too, though hardly so perilous a journey as that in quest of She. Alongside the intrinsic excitement of the trajectory, there has been the challenge of co-authorship. We knew from the start that the Freud in our title was to act as a possessive adjective. How prepossessing a one was an open question. What we were certain of is that the women were to have centre stage. The parts played by Freud's male teachers, his complex relationships with friends such as Wilhelm Fliess and Carl Jung, how he gained - and lost - his disciples have been described and interpreted elsewhere; our work does not pit the women against the men, nor does it compare them.

When it came to dividing up the material, it seemed logical, because of our different areas of expertise, that the male member of the team would engage with those women whom we know primarily through Freud's eyes - his family, his dreams and patients, as well as his ideas on femininity - while the female member would engage with those remarkable figures who were the first women analysts, translators and writers close to Freud. In the event, this proved to be largely the way things turned out, though, given the amount of discussion and mutual editing, every part of the book now bears a double imprint...

[1] The Interpretation of Dreams SE V 452-455