This introduction to Freud for undergraduate and graduate students has many virtues. It is clearly and forcefully written, keeps technical language to a minimum, brings in numerous real-life examples, anticipates at least some of the reader's possible objections, and firmly opposes many of the current clichés about Freud and psychoanalysis. The author presents Freudian psychoanalysis as a means of gaining access to the unconscious, as a revolutionary social theory, and as a powerful instrument for the analysis of literature, culture, and social change.

In doing so, de Berg concentrates on Freud's own ideas, ignoring the innumerable revisions to which they have been subjected in the past century, not because he is any kind of Freudian fundamentalist, but on the grounds that one must walk before one runs. But if one were teaching evolutionary biology, would one begin with the present state of knowledge,