Sigmund Freud is to become a Sherlock-style sleuth in a new Austrian drama backed by Netflix.
German-language series Freud will see a young version of the neurologist join forces with a police inspector and a medium to hunt down a serial killer terrorising 19th-century Vienna.
Variety reports that the series will be broadcast on Austrian television, with Netflix acquiring the rights for the UK, US, Germany and other international territories. Production for the series is due to begin this autumn.
It is not the first time that television has attempted to turn the “father of psychoanalysis” into a crime-solver. In 2014, X Files writer Frank Spotnitz was lined up to write Freud: The Secret Casebook, a series in which Freud would use his newfound theories to tackle unsolved cases, all while negotiating his tangled personal life. However, the series has not reached the small screen, with its development status unknown. A 2006 novel, The Interpretation of Murder, also features Freud solving a murder case, this time during a visit to New York in 1909.
Freud himself was said to be a fan of detective fiction, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in particular, with one of his most famous patients – the Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankejeff, AKA “the Wolf Man” – writing in his memoir that the psychologist had read “this author attentively”.
