Freud and Psychoanalysis, by W. W. Meissner, S.J., M.D.,  University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 2000,  294 pp.

This is an excellent book. Meissner is a classically trained, practicing psychiatrist-psychoanalyst who is also a Jesuit. He is familiar with the uses of doctrine and with how to communicate it to individuals for whom it is unfamiliar or even threatening. Meissner's contribution to the Gethsemani Studies in Psychological and Religious Anthropology, in which he took on the challenge of presenting psychoanalysis to a skeptical Roman Catholic readership, may also be the best introduction to our field for contemporary psychiatrists in training.

The presentation is clear and direct. The first five chapters trace Sigmund Freud's development from neuropathologist to psychoanalyst through a chronological presentation of his writings. Meissner begins with the Project for a Scientific Psychology. Having established Freud as an empirical scientist, he shows how and why his scientific orientation impelled him to move from early efforts to make human emotional life a branch of neurophysiology to the invention of a new sort of empirical science, psychoanalysis, based on careful and detailed clinical observation. We see psychoanalysis not as a fixed doctrine but as a dynamic organism that adapts as new information becomes available. The discussion of drive theory is illustrative. Meissner uses the difficult term instinct theory, which contemporary scholars decry as an arrogant mistranslation of the German Treibe; but he explains tactfully the reason early translators selected it and he encourages the reader to look beyond the fuss at the vital phenomena it represents. He acknowledges the contribution of Karl Abraham to the consolidation of this early theory; but the presentation is otherwise a careful exposition of Freud's ideas alone.

Beginning with Chapter 6, the organization of this book shifts in an interesting and successful way. Meissner continues his outline of the development of Freud's theory; but he weaves into the presentation of each element of that theory the contributi