Towards a Social Psychology of Psychoanalytic Knowledge: Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement: Dennis B. Klein,  Praeger, New York, 1981,  198 pp. Price: $27.95.

Klein, a social scientist, sets forth that psychoanalysis was germinated and given form by the on-going spirited Jewish controversy in turn-of-the-century Vienna. The dialectic (held I suspect within each assimilating Viennese Jew as well as between different Jewish groups) pitted sectarianism against universalism. The Jews' sense of worth had recently been breached by the exposed falsity of the promise of equality: an all too briefly ascendant Austrian liberalism had held out hope of full integration. Their debate enabled Jews to struggle back and give voice to a renewed feeling of having a most special ethnic identity. The synthesizing and uplifting formulation growing out of this Jewish controversy was that Jews, largely because of overcoming most difficult life circumstances, possessed a unique reparative power to be placed in the service of universal values. Jewish talents for reclamation would benefit all mankind. (Even Herzl vouched that the world would be freed by the liberty of a Zionist state and magnified by its greatness.) This formula may be observed in the self-lauding Jewish group of founding psychoanalysts announcing their movement's redemptive vision for the eradication of mental ailments.