Becker's wide-ranging study is a highly stimulating analysis of the historical journey to weld science and human values. Its scope is vast; it is at once erudite and critical in its attempt to develop an unified theory of human behavior, a task which Becker began in his The Birth and Death of Meaning: A Perspective in Psychiatry and Anthropology and in The Revolution in Psychiatry.

In his discussion of Freud's position relative to this issue, Becker sees an ambiguity. On the one hand, Freud's scientific theory of ego development was “a critical anthropology,” that is, a theory of the alienation of man in society. But Freud also developed another view of man, as a free subject in society and nature. And Freud subordinated “the free creation of value to the mechanism and determinism of instincts,” thus making “a biological problem out of what had to be primarily a social and historical one.” The promise lies in a union of Marx and Freud, of history and psychology.

H.S.