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On first perusal, this book appears to be of little interest to the working psychoanalytic clinician. The subject matter is not clinical, and the target audience seems to be academics who use psychoanalytic knowledge in their work on literary criticism and the humanities. However, a more complete examination of the book reveals that it has something to offer to those of us concerned with having psychoanalysis accepted as a legitimate scientific discipline, our failure to become part of the university community, and the pressures we face to produce empirical evidence for our claims. With a historical perspective in mind, Sarah Winter, a professor of English, is undertaking an ambitious investigation. She is not studying Sigmund Freud the clinician as much as she is looking at Sigmund Freud the politician, tactician, and intellectual crusader in his efforts to create out of psychoanalysis a legitimate discipline that he attempted to mould into a profession as well as a mainstay of university teachings. Winter, in her own words, is studying psychoanalysis as an exercise in historical epistemology. Her aim is to demonstrate how Freud used a number of strategies to place psychoanalysis in the forefront as an emerging legitimate field that could explain many of the problems faced by humankind, whether psychological, institutional, or cultural. The aim of my review is to follow the red thread of her arguments and wherever possible relate her themes to our current difficulties.
This book is divided into two parts. The first deals with Freud's effort to associate psychoanalysis with Greek mythology, affiliating it with the revered Bildung or philosophy of education that predominated in the Austro-Hungarian culture of his day. The second part is an exposition on how the founder of psychoanalysis attempted to create a profession for his field and how he systematically competed with other professions in order to explain universal problems of the human condition.
Winter's first th