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The author of this book is a political scientist who has previously written Freud: political and social thought , and Brother animal: the story of Freud and Tausk . In this book, though many of the psychoanalytic discoveries and theories are alluded to, the bias is biographical. And Roazen has a good understanding of the art of tracing the connections between a man and his work: the birth and growth of large ideas from the root of their human and personal origins. He has written a book based on interviewing, from 1964 to 1967, more than 110 people who had known Freud personally or participated in the early psychoanalytic movement; these include patients and relations, many of whom have since died.
Roazen also gained access to the Ernest Jones archives in the London Institute of Psychoanalysis, but not to the Sigmund Freud Archive, deposited in the U.S. Library of Congress, which (it is said) is to remain scaled for many decades to come.
Roazen's considered view of the psychoanalysts most loyal to Freud is that they did a disservice to the cause they advanced by their uncritical attitude. He found them too prone to adulation. He set out to re-examine the evidence about Freud's personality and to discover new sources of information. Free enquiry is undoubtedly the motive of his writing, but how free is it possible to be? He is not free from a wish to produce an unofficial book, in contrast to the authorized version written by Ernest Jones. He is a protestant, but not a merely crude iconoclast.
That said, it is also true that Roazen is prepared to capitalize the conflicts and painful issues. But it has to be remembered that while the existence of extreme passions has a very long history, it is probably psychoanalysis itself which has made everything in life openly discussable beyond the confines of the consulting room, where some analysts might like it to remain. Hence this very probing book.
Freud's considerable early difficulties in getting himself established seem very