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Freud: Biologist of the Mind, Frank J. Sulloway, Basic Books, New York, 1979, $20.00.
Frank Sulloway, a Harvard-trained historian of science, touts his ambitious study of psychoanalysis as a “comprehensive intellectual biography of Sigmund Freud,” a work which will expose “the Freud legend” perpetuated by a closed group of traditional “Freud scholars.” Sulloway hopes to expose the fallacies of these traditional readings and demonstrate that Freud was a “cryptobiologist,” or “biologist of the mind.” His new reading will show the errors of previous views and bring about major realignments in our view of psychoanalytic theory. For someone like myself, deeply immersed in psychoanalysis as theory and practice, these bold claims are challenging indeed. Perhaps, precisely because he approaches psychoanalysis from another field — as a foreign visitor — Sulloway will be able to see things that we on the inside miss because of our very familiarity. For the most deeply ingrained customs and assumptions may be more visible to a foreigner — one thinks of Tocqueville's account of American life — than to the natives. There are dangers in a view from the outside, of course. The foreign visitor may overestimate the importance of the trivial and miss the heart of native life, fail to distinguish what is truly essential from the desiderata. This is a special danger in the case of psychoanalysis, since Freud's work, not to mention the corpus of psychoanalysis elaborated by his followers, is such a mixture of ideas, hypotheses, observations, interpretations, new and old theory blended together, grand speculations alongside of theory with a solid grounding in clinical experience, and much else.