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Often, the cover pages of books contain exaggerated statements. This time though, this is not the case. As this volume declares, it delivers “a definitive radically new history of Freud, his disciples, and the tumultuous history” linked to them. The title of the book is well chosen. The narrative is in fact about the ‘Revolution in Mind’ fought by people who had a revolution on their mind and in their intentions. Moreover, it is “less the story of one man than it is the history of a series of heated intellectual contests”: “a way of thoughts closely allied with Freud's name” (p. 4). The narrative does indeed give a truthful image of the birth and evolution of Freudian thinking and places it in the broader context of the Central European, especially Viennese, cultural and scientific environment. In addition, it encompasses the history of the institutionalization and professionalization of psychoanalysis and highlights the interactions between psychoanalytic theory and its institutional history.
For starters, the author shows how Freud “took command of revolutions that were already in progress” (p. 5). Makari does not present either a hagiography or an attempt at Freud bashing. This is a truthful description of the complex and sometimes contradictory, tortuous ways in which this new thinking attempted to make the inner life of human beings understood. Unlike many of his predecessors, Makari does not try to re-write Jones's fundamental biography of Freud, and his work is neither an exaltation nor a depreciation of Freud's achievement. The book is in three parts. The first part is about the history of dreams and libido, the beginnings of the making of Freudian theory, This is followed in the second part by a description of the making of the Freudians a decade later, a phase that led to a crisis which exposed the highly tenuous nature of the knowledge of the human mind that had previously been gained. The controversies around Adler, Wittels and Jung, and others, led in tu