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The ideal work of scholarship should contrive at once to engage the general reader and to enlighten the specialist in a given field. Estelle Roith's The Riddle of Freud is such a work, and it deserves to be read by all those seriously interested in the origins of psychoanalysis.
The aim of Roith's book is announced by the subtitle. Hers is fundamentally a biographical enquiry, which seeks to account for one of the most controversial aspects of Freud's thought — his theory of female sexuality — by relating it to a no less vexed feature of his life — his Jewishness. By the end, Roith has not only explored each of these complex subjects on its own but has also succeeded in her overarching aim of convincing the reader that there is indeed a profound connection between the two.
Roith first re-examines Freud's theory of female sexuality and lucidly traces the evolution of the concept of penis envy from its initially limited role in 1908 to the central importance it assumed in 1924. She follows Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel in arguing that Freud's denial of an innate knowledge of the vagina in children of both sexes is untenable and originates in his own need to defend