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There are, we all know, several useful introductions to Freud's work for the nonspecialist. Now we have one more. The author, Jonathan Lear, is fully aware that he is joining a crowded field, but, as he explicitly insists, his book is different; it is, he claims, a “philosophical introduction.” No doubt he is exceptionally well placed to write such an introduction, for he is both a professional philosopher and an analyst trained at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. Still, it will emerge that he would have done Freud a greater favor if he had relied less on philosophy and more on history or, at least, biography. That would have given him better access to, and a more sensitive reading of, a set of ideas firmly rooted in an intellectual tradition than quoting Plato. Even psychoanalysts innocent of philosophy must know—Freud, after all, said so himself—that his and Plato's view of human nature bear striking similarities.
In organizing his material, Lear loosely follows the evolution of Freud the psychoanalyst. He begins with a chapter on the unconscious and then moves on to sexuality, dreams, transference, the principles of mental functioning, and the structure of the psyche, and closes with Freud's views on morality and religion. This last segment of Freud's work is, to his mind, its “least valuable aspect” (p. 192). This is not the only part of Freud's psychoanalytic theorizing that he finds fault with. Being at once involved (as an analyst) and detached (as a philosopher), Lear does have some useful distance from the ideas he is presenting.