Darwin's Influence on Freud: By Lucille B. Ritvo. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1990. Pp. 268.

This book is the culmination of thirty years of research and thought by an author unusually qualified in both the history of evolutionary biology and the history of psychoanalysis. Her researches began as a graduate student in the history of science at Yale University and were presented as a master's thesis, Darwin of the Mind in 1963. 'Darwin as the source of Freud's neo-Lamarckism' was published in 1965, and this was followed in 1972 by 'Carl Claus as Freud's professor of the new Darwinian biology'. For over forty years, she has had intimate contact with psychoanalysis as an analysand, as the wife of a distinguished psychoanalyst, and as a student and colleague of many leading analysts. In 1969 she found hidden in Freud's library in London a cache of books by Charles Darwin hitherto unknown to his biographers including Ernest Jones. These were signed and dated by Freud during the years 1875–1883, the period of his medical student years and early researches in biology. She also examined relevant titles in the library all of which bore similar dates. In 1969 she participated in and reported on a panel at the American Psychoanalytic Association on 'The ideological wellsprings of psychoanalysis'. In 1970 she collaborated with the late Max Schur on two papers, 'The concept of development and evolution in psychoanalysis' and 'A principle of evolutionary biology for psychoanalysis: Schneirla's biphasic theory …'

For this book Dr Ritvo has carefully studied every reference to Darwin in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud as well as pertinent letters and pre-psychoanalytic material. In his writings, beginning with a letter in 1875 and ending with Moses and Monotheism in 1939, for Freud, Darwin was 'the Great Darwin'. References in Freud's books were to Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), The Descent of Man (1871), and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) as well as to h