Philip Pomper is a careful intellectual historian, a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century Russian political and social thought; he has now written a fair and balanced account of the “psychohistorical” line of thought that runs from Freud to Erik H. Erikson, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, and Robert Lifton. It seems to me extraordinary that in an area so laden with partisanship Pomper is consistently able to give solid summary evaluations of all of these writers.

Pomper provides relatively brief overviews of each of the thinkers he examines, and I cannot think of even an instance of his being short-tempered in his effort to survey the way in which Freud's own work has been changed and built upon. Even though each of the post-Freudian thinkers departs in important ways from the “classical” psychoanalytic point of view, Pomper treats these contributions without