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This volume is difficult to review as a single entity since it is a collection of 20 papers covering a wide range of topics which are organized under rubrics touching on psychoanalytic aspects of history, philosophy, social and developmental psychology, educational theory and clinical work.
The section on psychoanalytic history deals ineluctably with Freud in its three contributions; Freud as an expert witness, Freud's Rund briefe 1920–1924 with the 'committee, ' and Freud's dreams analysed. It is a commentary on our history that it is so much, still, after some four score years, the history of one man.
Gunther and Trosman present Freud as expert witness testifying on the problems of malingering, compensation and treatment of the war neuroses. The historical vignette is sensitively developed in all of its implications. Gunther discusses the ambiguity with which Freud has to tread the narrow path between being politic and at the same time not sacrificing the integrity of his understanding of the neurotic process. In the current unresolved questions regarding where the allegiance of the therapist lies between social and personal poles there are important points raised here.
Carl Schorske's paper attempts to show that Freud in discussing his own dreams, gave full scope to an apolitical, ahistoric interpretation 'of human experience in which politics could be reduced to an epiphenomenal manifestation of psychic forces'. He discusses these dreams emphasizing what he feels Freud has slighted as political and social determinants such as his Jewishness, Austrian anti-Semitism and his dashed liberal hopes. Freud's emphasis on the subjective oedipal aspects of the dreams is interpreted as a flight from political rebellion and the re-emergence of this rebellion in covert form lies in the attack that psychoanalysis presented to cherished established beliefs. While Schorske the historian makes it clear that historico-political forces cannot be derived from and reduced to by-