Carlo Bonomi's two-volume tome on the historical origins of psychoanalysis is a fascinating read for many types of reader. For the serious psycho-historian, it is an authoritative research document on the beginnings of psychoanalysis in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries. For the average analytic practitioner, it examines the significance of trauma in the etiology of psychopathology. For the relational therapist, it establishes Sandor Ferenczi as the original contemporary psychoanalyst who blazed the way for current therapeutic approaches, including counter-transference analysis, field theory and mutuality, shared experience, learning from the patient, role reversal, and trans-generational transmission of trauma. For analysts interested in the politics of psychoanalysis, it reviews how Freud's earliest and arguably