Sigmund Freud and Impack on the Modern World (Annual of Psychoanalysis, Vol.  29). Edited by Jerome A. Winer and James William Anderson. Hillsdale, NJ:  The Analytic Press, 2001,  xii +  332 pp., $49.95. The Psychoanalytic Century: Freud's Legacy for the Future. Edited by David E. Scharff. New York:  Other Press, 2001.  xiii +  322 pp., $60.00.

Sigmund Freud is in the class of thinkers like Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, and Nietzsche, each of whom created a universe of meaning and a perennial legacy. Just as the works have given rise to a body of studies, so Freud studies, an ongoing endeavor of preservation, presentation, and interpretation of his ideas, has filled shelf after shelf with books and periodicals. As one of such thinkers and teachers Freud not only created a climate of opinion: he collected a body of knowledge about humankind and crafted the conceptual tools to interpret it. As the greatest psychologist since Aristotle, Freud set forth a new theory of mind and gave mental health professionals a new theory of the cause and cure of mental disorders.

Since early in the 1990s, psychoanalysis has been the target of mounting attacks from various quarters, coming to a head with the historical Freud exhibit, Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture, organized in 1998 by the Library of Congress and the Freud Museum in London and sent on tour to a number of cities here and in Europe. The two books reviewed here are collections commemorating that exhibit. They do not engage in polemics but rather are works reaffirming Freud's legacy. The essays, roundtable discussions, and interviews contained in these two excellent anthologies convey a great deal of information, are multi-faceted and highly readable, and provide food for thought for both professionals and laypersons interested in psychoanalysis.