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This is not simply another book about Freud. After reading many, often rather biased or tendentious, publications written “for” or “against” Freud during the past several decades, I find M. Guy Thompson's book surprisingly refreshing. The author presents the founder of psychoanalysis as a human being dedicated throughout his professional life to what he defined as psychological truths, and he illustrates this point by looking beyond the heavily natural scientific language which Freud had to adopt in conforming to the spirit and customs of the times. By revealing the rich experiential insights hidden beneath Freud's technical formulations, Thompson enables us to gain a much broader grasp of his thoughts, views, and methods. The author has the delightful and courteous skill of doing this without negative or prejudicial comments, yet also without any distortions of Freud's main contributions.
Thompson's presentation thus turns into an excellent example of a phenomenological approach to another human being's world, allowing us to understand rather than criticize it. Largely as a result of this presuppositionless procedure he is quite successful in revealing the important existential features in Freud's insights, features that have often been obscured by subsequent attempts in psychoanalysis to stress well-defined, inflexible techniques and orthodoxy. Thus Thompson has been able to show fruitful parallels between the most profound and essential contributions of psychoanalytic theories and procedures, and Heidegger's fundamental and rather revolutionary insights into human existence.
Thompson presents a Freud devoid of the many prejudicial, negative or positive implications that have been heaped upon him in the course of time, a Freud who would hesitate applying to the psychotherapist in training the tight shackles of a rigid methodology decreed as compulsory for everybody (and mostly suitable for providing the therapist with a false sense of security and confidence), a Fre