Freud: An Intellectual Biography. Joel Whitebook. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2017.  497 Pages.

Philosophically trained psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook weaves an ambitious group of themes into his extended biography of Freud's intellectual development. The overarching purpose is aptly named in the first section of the introductory chapter, which Whitebook calls “Reappropriating Freud.” A significant dimension of this reappropriation is deeply personal, reflecting Whitebook's return to a serious, comprehensive study of Freud's life and texts, decades after completing his psychoanalytic training.

What Whitebook calls “Accounting for the ‘Missing Mother’” is his primary theme. With it, he joins a search conducted over the past several decades by many analysts, feminists, and other scholars—some hostile, some friendly—in the developing field of Freud Studies, to come up with an understanding of the mother's part in a conceptual field originally centered on inevitable conflict with the father. He calls his “second theme” the “break with tradition,” which involves both Freud's break with a tradition-based notion of truth that embraced the scientific world view of Enlightenment thought, as well as the break with positivist rationality that became a key exponent of the “dark enlightenment.” Woven into the exploration of these themes are Whitebook's effort to locate Freud within the larger development of intellectual culture, to explore Freud's relation to the problems that have long occupied major philosophical strains of (mostly) western thought, and to account for the shift in the “hermeneutical horizon” that led him to the vantage points pursued in this book.

I will focus here on the central “missing mother” strand. A key question the book explores could be put something like this: how should we understand Freud (the man and his work) in relation to what is often called the pre-oedipal turn in psychoanalysis, which emphasizes the self's emergence as an individual from the merged state of the infant/mother and the importance of that experience for ongoing life?

In his exp