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Apollo, the patron god of the Pythagorians, vowed that Cassandra's prophecies were never to be believed, after she had rejected him. Science, the patron god of the nineteenth century, gave psychoanalysis the gift of prophecy. Psychoanalysis has rejected its patron god and has not been believed. What fate would have awaited Cassandra's daughter? With this thought-provoking idea, Schwartz embarks upon a history of psychoanalysis in Europe and America. The book is structured around three sections. The development of Freud's thinking in his early years in Vienna and his conflicts with Adler and Jung. A middle section in which he traces the history of psychoanalysis in the US and the contributions of William Alanson White and Harry Stack Sullivan. In the last section he follows the development of attachment theory from its Kleinian origins, the growth of feminism and the contributions of Kohut and Lacan.
Schwartz begins by suggesting that psychoanalysis has been the single most important intellectual development in the twentieth century. It shares with nineteenthcentury science the idea that human perception is the gateway to further understanding, though psychoanalysis claims that it is through free association that the human mind can best be understood. Schwartz, who was a scientist before he became a psychotherapist, argues, with great confidence and authority, that psychoanalysis is not unscientific. He cites the case of biology. Biology was not considered a successful science because it lacked precise mathematical rigour. The discovery of DNA over the last 50 years has demonstrated that molecular biology's success has been as the result of describing specific structures. The fact that molecular biology is descriptive can be accounted for by the fact that it is subject to evolutionary change, whereas the fundamental constituents of matter that make up the subject matter of physics and chemistry are not and are therefore subject to causal laws. This argument allows him