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The main focus of Homans' fine work, repeated and elaborated in a complex and difficult, but nonetheless rewarding text, is that psychoanalysis is a human, cultural or social science, that it originated as a creative response to the withering away of traditional symbols and communities following the industrial revolution and that Freud's primary goal, although never stated, was the interpretation of culture. This socio-historical humanistic view of psychoanalysis is very carefully articulated by Homans, but one comes away, nonetheless, experiencing a slightly narrowly focused work that often appears to exclude other possibilities of what psychoanalysis can be thought to be.
Freud's creativity is the result, Homans postulates, of pre-oedipal narcissistic needs, of early frustration and of periods of idealization of colleagues and teachers and the larger culture, followed by disillusionment, mourning and then the overcoming of loneliness and mourning by the creation of new ideas, such as psychoanalysis and new groups such as the Committee and the international psychoanalytical movement. Individuation follows mourning; creativity is born of loneliness and hurt. The loss of shared ideals leads to a deepening sense of self, to ego development and growth, to structure building, individuation, new forms of meaning, and self-awareness and new self objects. 'Psychoanalysis arose as the result of a long, historical mourning process begun centuries ago, with roots in the seventeenth century and in the theology of the fourteenth' (p. 4).
One cannot, however, read The Ability to Mourn without re-thinking the origins of psychoanalysis and aspects of Freud's life and without engaging in a running inner dialogue with the author. The breadth of Homans' scholarship is enormous and the demand it places upon the reader is considerable. Psychoanalysis, Homans tells us, is deeply embedded in the life of Freud, in his socio-historical time and place, his alienation, and his attempts a