Freud in Exile: Psychoanalysis and Its Vicissitudes: edited by Edward Timms and Naomi Segal,  Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1988,  310 pp., $32.50.

Continuing the seemingly unending outpouring of books devoted to Freud's life and work, this volume of 23 essays was compiled to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Freud's arrival in London as an exile from the hating and hateful Nazis. The ingenuity employed in finding new approaches to the investigation of Freud as a man derives from all fields of human endeavor and study, and an almost unexpected consequence of such efforts is the revelation of new measures of the vicious destructiveness of the Hitler period in German history. There are those, such as Peter Gay, who recommend a rapprochement with the Germans and Austrians and greater efforts to understand their behavior, but they themselves have not yet found a way to live with this period of their history. Almost every book about Freud reignites the incredulity and amazement at the behavior of the Nazis and their cohorts.

The book is divided into four parts of which the first, “Origins,” deals with the development both of psychoanalysis and its exile. This section is of extreme interest in shedding light on its topic. Above all it explains Freud's persistent preoccupation with anti-Semitism. It is probably correct to say that all Jews have felt the sting and obstructive weight of anti-Semitism, but Freud's multitudinous