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This very interesting book discusses the life, ideas and achievements of the American psychoanalyst Smith Ely Jelliffe (1866–1945). It has a foreword by Arcangelo R. T. D'Amore, it contains a critical and subtle biography of Jelliffe by historian John C. Burnham, and Jelliffe's correspondence with Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung edited by William McGuire. This is certainly the type of work that will be attractive to all those psychoanalysts who are interested in the history and development of the psychoanalytic movement, and in the study of the complex mechanisms of diffusion and dissemination of psychoanalytic knowledge into culture.
Jelliffe was a man of many qualities who was actively involved during his lifetime with many different intellectual pursuits. According to Burnham:
Jelliffe, for half a century a major figure in American medicine, was also one of the first actual practitioners of psychoanalysis. His career provides insights into the history of medical science; of medical practice, institutions, and customs (the folklore, as it were, of the profession); of medical journalism; of the mental and nervous disease specialties broadly and of psychosomatics in particular. He was an examplar of the manifold ways in which society and medicine interacted (p. xiii).
Although Jelliffe never really became the head of a 'school' in any of these areas of work, two generations felt his impact in person and in print. The generation that flourished in the early twentieth century was influenced by his far-ranging scholarship, by his social concerns and by his interests in scientific medicine, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and psychological thinking and interpretation. The intellectual, medical and psychiatric world of the 1920's, 1930's and 1940's constituted the second generation to be influenced by Jelliffe. His holistic approach and his ideas about the complex interaction and interdependence of the mental and physical functioning of each human being helped to prepar