3) When Nietzsche Wept, by Irvin D. Yalom

I enjoyed this novel, even though I know very little about the philosophical or medical background to it. The year is 1882, the place Vienna; the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche seeks treatment from Josef Breuer, who with his young colleague Sigmund Freud is experimenting with a new “talking cure” for cases of mental illness. Yalom, himself a psychiatrist, is gently didactic about both the earliest days of his own profession and Nietzsche’s philosophy, and even manages to work the two into something resembling a plot. A helpful postscript explains which bits of the book are based on established historical fact and which are fictional. Rather a good read.