You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is a revelation and alters the psychoanalytic landscape. The idealized or vilified region is transformed into a rich, complex, but detailed human cityscape full of drama. These dramas were enacted by outstanding scientists and intellectuals who began exploring the question: How can one scientifically investigate the working of the human mind, the data of which are subjective? Ideas were forged in heated pitched debates, in ardent competition, with battles won and lost. Freud entered this arena and discovered his calling. He ingested ideas, synthesized them, and aggressively became a major player, intent on winning. Makari not only amazes with his ability to encompass in detail such a large amount of material, but he also captures his reader's attention by a talent for telling a story and his ability to summarize the scientific and philosophic ideas in understandable language.
Makari, as the director of Cornell's Institute of the History of Psychiatry, steeped himself with fascination into the intellectual world that gave rise to psychoanalysis and regretted how much the spotlight on Freud, whether for or against him, overshadowed a wide array of prominent actors whose ideas, experiences, and debates profoundly contributed to its development. This book is his response. I can only highlight a few of the ideas that enlivened the intellectual atmosphere in which Freud forged his grand theories.
The mind is not just a mirror of reality, wrote Imanuel Kant in the early nineteenth century, for our perceptions are organized by a priori categories like time and space. Arthur Schopenhauer transformed these a priori categories into an inner force, which he called will. This will projects inner representations into the outer world. Around the middle of that century, under the influence of August Comte's positivism, these philosophic contemplations were dismissed as invalid. Science did not regard the study of mind as legitimate, only phenomena determined by mechanistic