But Facts Exist.: Thomas Freeman. London:  Karnac Books. 1998. Pp.  183.

Thomas Freeman has achieved a great deal during his lifetime's work as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He has made meticulous studies of the sufferings of psychotic patients and has written extensively on the theory and treatment of these conditions. At the same time, as is less widely known, he has been responsible for much of the growth and development of psychoanalysis in Northern Ireland through his Presidency of the Northern Ireland Association for the Study of Psychoanalysis (NIASP), which is a Study Group within the IPA. Freeman has taught and written throughout his life, and he possesses a capacity for precision and clarity of thought that makes reading and listening to him a rewarding experience, whether or not one agrees with his views. Freeman is an experienced clinician who, despite his abiding interest in theory, places the patient and clinical facts at the forefront of his work.

His new book deals with observable clinical facts, or at least the limited range of them, as he sees it, in contrast to the ever-increasing proliferation of psychoanalytic theories about such clinical facts. Freeman is distinctly unimpressed with much of contemporary psychoanalytic theorising, which he sees as being at least to some extent a consequence of the nature of the psychoanalytic setting, which makes verification of clinical facts difficult. He sets the stage for his critique by reviewing those facts that he believes are apparent and verifiable within the psychoanalytic situation and he does so by summarising Freud's ideas on the pleasure principle, wish-fulfilment, primary process, the modus operandi of dreams and the utterances of schizophrenic patients. He gives fascinating clinical examples in support of Freud's theories. In fact, one of the pleasures of this book is being able to read Freeman's first-hand clinical accounts of work with seriously disturbed