Professor Jahoda's book is written for academic psychologists. Her starting point is that, ‘Freud's place in man's intellectual enterprises is still unsettled.’ The author, being an academic and Professor Emeritus of Social Psychology in the University of Sussex, has, as a running motive throughout the book, the question of whether or not psychoanalysis is a science and she relates this to the problems of psychology as a science. Jahoda considers that Freud's claim that psychoanalysis is a science rests upon psychological determinism and the method of psychoanalytical observation. As she points out, much rests on one's conception of science and whether one distinguishes between natural and other sciences. Jahoda's view is that it would have an affinity to the natural sciences if meanings were inferred from conscious and unconscious mechanisms, rather than imposed retrospectively. She feels that the challenge of psychoanalytic thought is that it