Playwright, short story writer, essayist, novelist, and novelist, Arthur Schnitzler knew like few others how to synthesize the most authentic aspects of the heart. A tormented writer, his works are intimate, full of anguish, desolation, and personal tragedy. His texts exude misery and fascination, the gleams, false or otherwise, of the human condition. Feelings dissected with the coldness and certainty of his metaphysical scalpel. *The Doctor of the Baths*—the first title in Schnitzler's Great Works collection—is further proof of his skill in analyzing human instincts and passions. If in *Chronicle of a Woman's Life* Schnitzler, often compared to Freud, from whom he anticipated ideas and from whom he received a letter in 1906 in which the latter confessed that Schnitzler was his creative double, reveals the external and internal life of Therese Fabiani, a young Austrian woman from a decadent family, here the object of his analysis is Dr. Emil Gräsler. The character whose profession gives the novel its title, Dr. Gräsler, is merely the starting point for more comprehensive advances in the field of psychology. His character is presented with impressive precision: his monstrous selfishness, his brutal indifference to the deepest feelings of others, his pathological fear of making a decision, and his self-doubt. The allure of the abyss, the paramount importance of the small: everything appears. Uncertainty hovers over all the doctor's actions and his relationships with the four women who surround his destiny. The first is Friederike, his spinster sister, his housekeeper, and a true enigma; the second is Sabine, the daughter of an elderly retired actor, who represents a great chance for love in Gräsler's life; the third is Katharina, the sweet suburban girl. The fourth is almost a coincidence, but the decisive unforeseen... Considered immoral, Schnitzler scandalized critics and gave them the only answer he considered valid: his own work: "If it endures, you have won." And it endures.
