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Non-Freudians, particularly students eager for a quick, clear impression of the psychoanalytic field, are likely to welcome this lucid and concise contribution to the ‘Past Masters Series’. Ardent devotees of Freud might regard it with caution as an oversimplified exposition of his central ideas, or perhaps question some of the author's sharper criticisms, but for the ignorant or impartial reader these occasional sly touches of astringency could well be hailed as the most stimulating aspect of the book.
While striving to do justice to Freud's ultimate achievement, Storr makes little attempt to present him as a sympathetic character. Rather, he is at pains to emphasise his rigidity, lack of warmth, tendency to generalisation and need to order and control. Breuer described his colleague as ‘a man given to absolute and exclusive formulations’ and again as ‘a system-builder, claiming his system as a science, not a philosophy’. In a letter to Jung, Freud himself says of the obsessional type that he ‘vegetates in a sealed-off world of his own’. Although Storr in no way presents Freud as vegetating, he is severe about some of his inevitable errors of judgment and does not hesitate to point out instances where research has not confirmed his concepts. Early on we are brought up against the fact that one of Freud's more important early statements: ‘In the end we infallibly come to the field of sexual experience …’ was based on a mere eighteen cases of hysteria. Later Storr questions whether the Oedipus complex is in fact a universal phenomenon or merely a Western concept inapplicable to extended families where polygamy is the norm. He also queries Freud's view of infantile amnesia and the latency period. In general he sees his emphasis on psycho-sexual development as too extreme, ignoring intellectual curiosity and desire for human knowledge as possible factors in their own right, but in opposition to J. M. Masson he pays tribute to his eventual abandonment of the seduction th