Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) was born in Moravia before his family moved to Vienna. Fleeing Nazi persecution in 1938, he took refuge in London where he died the following year. He is the founder of psychoanalysis and one of the most important, if controversial, thinkers of the 20th Century.

Joan Riviere (1883 - 1962) was born in Brighton before moving to Gotha, Germany at seventeen where she spent a year perfecting her German. After a war-time analysis with Ernest Jones, Riviere began to see patients of her own and became a founding member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She met Freud at a conference in the Hague in 1920 and asked to be analysed by him. The same year she became Translation Editor of the newly established British Journal of Psycho-Analysis, a post she held until 1937.

Lisa Appignanesi is the author of Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors, and Freud's Women (with John Forrester), alongside many other books. She was Chair of the Freud Museum London, President of English PEN and is currently Chair of the Royal Society of Literature.