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History is a tale told about the past in the present for present purposes.
—Paul Ricoeur
How, asks Lawrence Friedman, can we explain the contemporary renaissance of psychoanalytic inquiry? To answer, he takes us back to a time of discovery in which Sigmund Freud sculpted difficult and perplexing encounters with patients into the psychoanalytic situation. It is an ambitious and important story Friedman seeks to tell, for he would have it act as a point of origin, a beginning to organize our present and guide our future.
An historically minded, philosophically trained psychiatrist, Lawrence Friedman has over the past twenty-five years shown an ability to cut through jargon, grab hold of essentials, and allow us to envision the hidden problems and potentials at the heart of psychoanalysis. In the tradition of American pragmatists, Friedman is interested in the interplay between ideas and praxis. His brilliant 600-page opus, The