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After having read Mahony's several books on Freud's writing, we come to look forward to each of his additions to the list, and to pounce on them with an alacrity that reveals our eagerness to learn from Mahony's approach. It has been said Freud's skill in the use of language would have sold any of his ideas, no matter what their scientific validity. This, of course, is not true but Mahony's expert understanding of language as applied to Freud's skills makes for an exciting approach to the delights provided by the original exponent of psychoanalysis.
One cannot summarize this book because it contains many fine points that clarify Freud's ideas but cannot be usefully taken out of context. However, several generalities may be examined. Mahony emphasizes two features that Freud himself stressed in his writing. They are the dogmatic and genetic forms of exposition that Freud employed for his own purposes in laying bare the development of his thought.
Mahony examines the use of dogmatic and genetic writing in the “Studies on Hysteria” and here too he introduces the reader to the concept of deictics, “orientational features in language, dealing with the time and place of utterances” (p. 44) and stresses his view that, “The important linguistic notion of deixis has been woefully neglected in Anglo-American psychoanalytic literature” (p. 45). From the Studies on Hysteria, Mahony singles out the case of Katherina, to re-present the case history and give us features of Freud's thinking not put forth in the Standard Edition. We are treated to another of the now numerous statements that the translation of the Standard Edition is inadequate. It is interesting to compare Mahony's picture of Katherina with that of Dora, who was recently closely studied by Hannah S. Decker in her Freud, Dora and Vienna 1900. The similarity between the two cases is striking, and both authors point out the evidence of the sexual arousal induced in Freud by these two patients. Paul Schilder made the asto