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Peter L. Rudnytsky is Professor of English at Florida State University and Editor of American Imago. He writes as a literary critic, not a clinical psychoanalyst, hence the apt title of the book, Reading Psychoanalysis. The subtitle, however, might have been more descriptive: Perhaps something like The Legacy of Rank, Ferenczi, and Groddeck or to include Freud, perhaps Reading Psychoanalysis After Freud. In any case, Rudnytsky's text is freed from the considerations of the practicing clinician and he, himself, asserts the advantages of his nonspecialist perspective noting that a discipline that “trespasses on the domains of so many specialists” (p. 212) is well served by the attention of a generalist. However here Rudnytsky may be modest, the breath of knowledge he brings to bear seems to qualify him as a polymath.
This collection of nine essays, the organization of which Rudnytsky describes as organized as an expanding spiral, begins with an examination of Freud's use of evidence and rhetorical tactics in his paper on Jensen's Gravida, a work that fittingly for Rudnytsky's overall theme survives because of Freud's commentary not because of its inherent merit. The collection ends with a vision of the realization of Freud's dream of psychoanalysis as a general science of mind, but ironically at the cost of repudiation of the Freudian canon. The reader may fairly wonder if Rudnytsky has come to praise Freud or bury him. Sandwiched between are essays on Little Hans, Rank, Groddeck, and Ferenczi. Rudnytsky asks the text be judged by the criteria appropriate to literary criticism, that is, “by the passion and fidelity of its engagement with the works it discusses.” In this he is wildly successful. His writing is characterized simultaneously by grace and precision as well as a scholar's attention to both evidence and detail. One of the many delights of the book is his sensitivity to language and the skill with which he extracts meaning from it. As just one example, he exam