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Nigel Mackay's Motivation and Explanation has a number of remarkable strengths. Although Mackay is trained in psychology and is Professor of Psychology at Wollongong University in Australia, this work, which is based on his University of Oxford doctoral thesis, is essentially on the philosophy of science. On the basis of past performances, one does not expect philosophers or experimental psychologists to have an unbiased or uncluttered familiarity with Freud's clinical findings and theories, let alone a thorough and profound grasp of them or, at least, those essential to his argument. Perhaps the worst example of this sort of failure is Popper (1963), who used his own ill-informed version of psychoanalysis as a whipping boy for his falsification criteria. Wittgenstein (1942–1946), MacIntyre (1958), Flew (1970), Ricoeur (1970), Habermas (1972), Dilman (1984), while making a better effort at understanding, end up distorting psychoanalysis as a result of needing to find in it either the weaknesses or strengths required