Il Giovane Freud: By E. Funari. Turin: Loescher. 1982.

Funari's lively work, originally published in 1975, represents a study of Freud's development as a young man. To date, if one excepts Sulloway's book, very little in the way of any serious attempt has been made to study Freud's thought in terms of its more or less direct links with the nineteenth century cultural and scientific tradition to which he owes so much, and Funari regrets this fact. There has been a consequent reluctance on the part of many psychoanalysts to enter into any theoretical debate in historical, critical and epistemological terms, with the result that metapsychological theory has become entrenched within its own terms of reference, as have certain general aspects of clinical research. Funari's analysis of Freud's pre-analytical phase clearly does not aim to put forward some reassessment of psychoanalysis in biological or neurophysiological terms; it rather undertakes a philological and exegetical study of the stages in Freud's development, up to the appearance of Die Traumdeutung, generally accepted as the definitive watershed between the young and the more mature Freud.

The book falls into two sections. The first consists of a critical and historical appraisal of Freud's connexions with the 'Viennese' school and, via the work of some of its members, with the 'Berliner Physicalischer Gesellschaft'. The second section contributes towards a theory of perception in Freudian metapsychology. Funari is a psychoanalyst and teaches psychology at Milano University. He started his career as a psychologist in the school of C. L. Musatti, the patriarch of Italian psychoanalysis and also of Italian psychology, whose school in Milan is a tribute both to his skill and to his commonsense. It is a school which not only acknowledges the complex work done in the field of perceptive and cognitive psychology linked with the Gestalt movement, but often draws comparisons between the findings of such studies and those of psychoanalysis. Funari's connexions with