One might think a subject as thoroughly scrutinised as Freud's life would now offer slim pickings to all but the most polemical biographers. Yet Peter M. Newton, a Professor of Psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California and a private practitioner, has written an engaging and original book, proving that some lives fruitfully bear endless re-interpretation.

Newton's Freud is informed but not encumbered by the expansive domain of Freud scholarship. His is decidedly not a biography with a huge bibliography or an imposing academic apparatus. Quite fittingly, Newton stands upon