Head of Zeus lands O'Mahony's deep-dive into Freud, Trotter and Jones

Head of Zeus (HoZ) has scooped Seamus O’Mahony’s The Guru, The Bagman and The Sceptic, which tells the story of the intertwined lives of psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, surgeon Wilfred Trotter and Sigmund Freud.

Editor-in-chief Neil Belton acquired world all language rights from the author. The book will be published in hardback and e-book under the Apollo Non-Fiction imprint on 2nd February 2023.

"Ernest Jones was Sigmund Freud’s closest associate and most fervent disciple, and his authorised biographer," the synopsis reads. "Accused at least twice of inappropriate sexual behaviour with young female patients, Jones found salvation in the new cult of psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, his friend Wilfred Trotter – a celebrated surgeon who saved the life of George V, and who took on Freud himself as a patient during his London exile – refused to yield to the seductions of the new Freudianism. From the first psychoanalytic congress in Salzburg in 1908 to the illness of King George in the late 1920s and the meeting of Freud and Trotter in 1939, Seamus O’Mahony tells the story of these figures with his customary wit and erudition.

"Not only the story of the development of psychoanalysis, this is a book about the sexual obsessions of intellectual and bohemian circles in London, Cambridge and Vienna, of Bloomsbury, of doctors in pursuit of wealth and fame. It covers a pivotal 30 years in European history, and reveals how and why the writings of a failed neurologist from Vienna became so influential."

Belton said: "Seamus O’Mahony’s witty, acidly realistic writing about the culture and history of medicine has gripped me from the moment I read a review essay that he wrote several years ago. His books are models of lucidity and intelligence, and his latest – about the strange relationship between Freud’s most uncritical propagandist, Ernest Jones, Freud himself and the brilliant and decidedly unimpressible surgeon Wilfred Trotter – is a drily funny, jaw dropping account of sexual shenanigans and the inner life of one of the century’s most successful cults."

O’Mahony spent many years working for the National Health Service in Britain. Now living in his native Cork, he is the author of The Way We Die Now, which won a BMA Book Award in 2017, Can Medicine Be Cured? and The Ministry of Bodies, all published by HoZ. 

"I’ve always been fascinated by psychoanalysis as a social and cultural phenomenon," he said. "The intersecting lives of Freud, Jones and Trotter was the ideal framework for me to write about it. This is not an academic book for a specialist readership. My aim is of course to entertain, inform and amuse, but also to argue for science over dogma."