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If, as Hegel opines, “the study of the history of philosophy is the study of philosophy itself” (1805-6, 1:30), then might it also be argued that the study of the history of psychoanalysis is the study of psychoanalysis itself? If so, then George Makari's Revolution in Mind is a must read for anyone with a serious interest in the field.
Makari's book effectuates an eye-opening paradigm shift in the telling of psychoanalytic history. At its core, it provides a corrective to the mythologizing that presumes a linear model of intellectual development. The classic rendition of psychoanalytic history begins with the ideas of Freud arising in a relative vacuum, as Freud himself presented them in On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914), then moves through his subsequent elaborations of libido theory and structural theory, and culminates in the apotheosis of American ego psychology. The title and subtitle of Makari's volume serve multiple functions: they capture not only his guiding theme of the allied yet distinct Freudian and psychoanalytic “revolutions” but also, and perhaps more importantly, the transformative value of reconceptualizing psychoanalytic history.
In his preface, Makari points out the flaws in previous versions of psychoanalytic history that center on the genius of Freud's revelations about the unconscious. In their various iterations, a false choice is presented in which Freud is seen either as an intellectual prophet who delivered great truths regarding the life of the mind or as the fraudulent purveyor of a pseudoscientific closed system of thought aimed at instantiating a particular bourgeois vision of family life. Makari exposes the fallacy in this type of binary thinking as he helps the reader to