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Something immediately strikes the reader of this very interesting book on Freud: the fact that it was published in a series named 'key sociologists', alongside works on Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, Georg Simmel etc. The inclusion of Freud's name in a series that is defined by its editor as intending to 'present concise and readable texts covering the work, life
and influence of the most important sociologists, and sociologically-relevant thinkers, from the birth of the discipline to the present day' is in itself an unequivocal recognition of Freud as a social thinker. In this book Dr Bocock, who is a lecturer in sociology at the Open University, argues consistently and in an accessible manner that Freud produced a social theory and that sociology would profit from understanding and eventually using it.
The book is divided into four chapters and contains a final section with 'suggestions for further reading' which is bound to be helpful to those unacquainted with the area. In the first chapter, which is also the introduction, there is a biographical sketch of Freud and examples of writers whose work is frequently quoted as part of what is becoming increasingly known as 'the unconscious before Freud'. Concerning the latter, Bocock makes in passing a very interesting point, one which is usually absent from discussions of this kind:
All original theories can be found in the works of predecessors in one form or another. The point is that there is a sense in which no one knew the insights were there in the earlier writers before a thinker like Freud, or Marx, or Darwin, produces a rationally formulated theory applied to specific concrete materials. Once the theory has been so formulated by someone like these major thinkers then it becomes possible to see the ideas present as insights in earlier writers (p. 18, second italics mine).
In other words, the very idea of 'predecessor', so befitting our naive and conscious conception of time (past/