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George Makari has written an intellectual history of psychoanalysis from its initial creation to its dissolution in central Europe in the wake of the Nazi holocaust. He briefly discusses its reconstitution in England and the United States with the influx of immigrant analysts escaping the Nazi destruction. We see the usual cast of characters like Josef Breuer, Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Ernst Jones, Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, Heinz Hartmann, and Anna Freud to just name a few of the many important players in the creation of the psychoanalytic movement. What makes this history relatively unique is that Makari does not so much write a drama of conflicting personalities, each of whom looms larger than life, as have most histories of psychoanalysis but, rather, Makari traces the history of conflicting ideas and points of view. Makari is more of a master sleuth of ideas, than of new gossipy tidbits about our psychoanalytic forbears. Makari painstakingly traces the origins of the various ideas that came to constitute psychoanalytic theory.
Usually we think of a heroic Sigmund Freud working in splendid isolation, developing the key concepts of psychoanalysis in response to his challenging