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Aron and Starr's volume is a sweeping, sometimes breathtakingly expansive, cultural history of psychoanalysis as it came to be transplanted from the first half of the 20th century Europe to the Americas in the second half of that same century. It focuses particularly on the “Golden Age” of psychoanalysis in the United States in
the 1950s. It is a scathing and unabashed critique of the misogyny, racism, power pursuing, and status hunger of the psychiatric psychoanalytic American profession. This attack is as broad as it is deep—to understand the Golden Age roots of the current crisis in American psychoanalysis, the authors unveil the exclusionary tactics of the white male medical psychoanalysts of the 1950s and expose the ways in which the early ego psychologists, who emigrated from Europe in the 1930s to escape Nazi persecution, rode the wave of triumphant American power after World War II. They take us back to Freud's Vienna and Abraham's Berlin and painstakingly demonstrate that the roots of the current crisis are embedded in Freud and his colleagues' horrific encounters with the racism, misogyny, and crushing anti-Semitism of Europe at the turn of the Millennium. Freud, in the authors' depiction of his encounters with his own homosexual aspects and his society's growing and deepening hatred of Jews, emerges as a genius who sought and found place on the boundaries, a way to live and work that was “optimally marginal” (p. 29). Yes, readers of psychoanalytic history and of Freud's biography, a scientist, Jew, and brilliant innovator, are familiar with attempts to recognize the effects of Freud's Judaism and personal sexual conflicts; but what is woven into these pages is a narrative of that life and intellectual revolution that evokes repeated and deeply experienced “double takes,” the kind of surprise that comes of appreciating the explication of fresh and provocative links. One of the many examples of such skillfully narrated tales is the descrip