Israel Rosenfield, Freud's “Megalomania.” New York:  Norton, 2000.  173 pp. $21.95.

Was Freud a genius, a scientist whose ideas advanced our understanding of human psychology, a thinker who powerfully shaped our conception of ourselves? Or was he a charlatan, a man who constructed theories from his own fantasies, distorted observations of patients to fit his preconceived notions, and founded a closed and authoritarian movement that has more in common with religious and political ideologies than with science? As the “Freud wars” swirl around us, with the all-out attacks of Frederick Crews and his cohorts on one side, and the ever-faithful orthodox, such as Peter Gay, on the other, it is difficult to define a middle ground that captures what is valuable in Freud—and there is a great deal of value—while also illuminating the blind spots and wrong turns.

One way to approach this dilemma is by way of Fiction, where an author has much more freedom and scope in exploring the byways of Freud's contributions. Israel Rosenfield, a professor of intellectual history at the City University of New York and author of several books and essays on the brain, turns his hand, in Freud's “Megalomania,” to a work of the imagination: not quite a novel, in part a satire, a serious exploration of cognitive science and psychoanalysis, as well as a pseudohistory where imagined characters mix with real people and events: Anna Freud and John von Neumann, the mathematician whose work paved the way for the computer, engage in a fictitious conversation; a colleague of Gustave Eiffel's appears to tell Freud how Eiffel stole the invention of the famous tower from him. And all of this is carried off with intelligence and wry humor.

The book begins with an “Introduction” by one Albert J. Stewart, a fictional cognitive scientist, who has been given a manuscript—Freud's “Megalomania”—by a woman who identifies herself as Freud's granddaughter: the daughter of a woman who was the illegitimate child of Freud's Parisian