After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America. Edited by John Burnham. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2012,  vi + 274 pp., $35.00. The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis. By Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012,  x + 404 pp., $95.00 hardcover, $24.99 paperback.

Like psychoanalysts in general, historians of psychoanalysis tend to be inward-looking. However it happens—whether through a transformative experience of reading, an encounter with an inspiring teacher, or being smelted in the crucible of therapy—we discover psychoanalysis, and over time it becomes our vocation. We learn to see the world with psychoanalytic eyes and increasingly take on a psychoanalytic identity. Things that are extraneous to psychoanalysis, concomitantly, we may (in our professional capacities) grow indifferent to, and whatever is hostile to psychoanalysis we will be predisposed to repel and refute.

It is the merit of the two books under review that they make us aware of this state of affairs and, in so doing, may help us become uncomfortable with it. The first, John Burnham's expertly edited volume, After Freud Left—inspired by the centenary of the 1909 conference at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, which occasioned Freud's lone trip to the United States—does so by enlarging our intellectual horizons in a way that could cause no offense to anyone. The second, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani's The Freud Files, although the authors' inability to see more than one side of any question should arouse misgivings in even favorably disposed readers, constitutes by virtue of the very severity of its indictment an important contribution to the history of psychoanalysis.

Burnham, research professor in the department of history at Ohio State University and best known to a psychoanalytic constituency for