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This volume contains an incredible amount of knowledge regarding various attempts over the past hundred years to systematically unravel the mysteries of subjectivity, to conjoin the intricacy of psychology with the objectivity of science. Many are the offspring of that shotgun marriage: some forsook all efforts at consensual validation in favor of speculative insight or the breadth of comprehensive theory; others stressed objectification and a narrowly conceived “empiricism” to the detriment of giving full value to the individual's inner life. There has been an incessant fluidity between these two poles. The endeavor clearly can survive only in a spirit of complementarity: only an insistent effort to reconcile the need to do justice to the richness of subjectivity with the imperative to establish transpersonal laws, to combine the insights of the clinical case and the personal truth with the construction of theories, can approximately fulfill the task of understanding and treating the mind. What remains necessary is a back-and-forth between two approaches to Being: the I-You relationship and the I-It experience, to use Martin Buber's concepts.
George Makari, a psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry and its history, has written a wonderfully comprehensive work that describes in a spellbinding, even passionate, way the history of this search roughly between 1850 and 1950. It is by no means a new biography of Freud, though Freud's personality, his struggles, and the philosophical and practical (even political) shifts in his career have had to take center stage: “this is less the story of one man than it is the history of a series of heated intellectual contests. … Sigmund Freud did not so much create a revolution in the way men and women understood their inner lives. Rather, he took command of revolutions that were already in progress” (pp. 4–5).
In light of the current philosophical and technical shift from the intrapsychic to the relational, it is fascinating to obs