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The relevance of psychoanalysis to social and political sciences is still uncertain. On the one hand its importance has been blown up to unjustifiable proportions and on the other it has been watered down, largely dissolved or disregarded altogether: ‘once a person begins to believe it, he can believe anything’ (p. 5); yet in each field it would seem obvious that a good personality theory is indispensible.
So as to cut through the chaos Roazen has gone straight to the source—to Freud himself—and has made a critical survey of die development of psychoanalysis. His study makes good reading and, as far as my knowledge of Freud goes, he has an exceptional grasp of the nature of Freud's work: there is not much that is essentially new, but it is put exceptionally well.
That Freud had an imaginative and speculative mind which needed the check of day-to-day clinical testing for it to work at its best, and that his imaginative works like Totem and taboo, Civilization and its discontents, Leonardo da Vinci and Moses and monotheism are more revealing of Freud himself than of the subjects under consideration, has been said before but not so concisely. Because he understands the method of reconstruction in a too-rigid way, I thought Roazen sometimes pressed his argument rather far. That no confirmation of the primal horde idea can be found does not necessarily mean it is altogether off the mark, and I cannot see any harm in Freud's pressing home his theoretical conclusions to see where they lead when applied to social and religious fields. So long as they are not taken as basic to psychoanalysis no confusion need arise. Only when they are seized on and explained to display unwarrantably the supposed nonsense to which psychoanalysis leads is the essence of psychoanalysis distorted. Roazen effectively demolishes this error. He understands that psychoanalysis does not depend on imaginative speculation but rests upon the method that Freud devised and the theoretical conclusions that h