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This is an interesting and thought-provoking book, though its title is, almost, deceptive For the book does not really provide a clear and unambiguous description of Freud's theories about art and the aesthetic. However, the reason for this lies in Professor Spector's thesis that in fact Freud's theories about art are ambiguous. He suggests that this is so because, first, Freud's own aesthetic understanding remained extraordinarily conservative, and his artistic sensitivity never developed beyond the stance characteristic of a nine-teenth-century liberal Central European professional man. Thus even the Impressionists, let alone any of the later schools of painting, were dismissed by him and even scorned, and he reproached modern art for having lost ‘the feeling for the beauty of line’. (p. 13.) Secondly, Spector suggests that Freud experienced considerable ambivalence in his relationship to artists. On the one hand, he considered them as endowed with talents so mysterious and unfathomable that they would forever elude our understanding and that even psychoanalysis would have to lay down its arms before them. On the other, he described the artist as having ‘unusually powerful instinctual demands that his introverted disposition prevents him from satisfying, so that he must live in a fantasy world, on the border line of neurosis’, (p. 101) and he also referred to artists as being ‘people who have no occasion to submit their inner life to the strict control of reason’ (p. 33). Moreover, in his early years, Freud seems to have felt himself to be in sexual rivalry with artists, for, as he is supposed to have remarked to Ernest Jones, ‘they possess in their art a master key to open with ease all female hearts’. (p. 33).