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The author of Jung in Context gives us another boundary-crossing book, this time focusing on Freud and the psychoanalytic movement. It is a dense, heavily researched work written from the academic viewpoint. Drawing on both established and lesser-known theorists in the fields sociology, religion, psychology, psychoanalysis and economics. Humans looks along, and out from, an axis between the polarities of self and culture, creating a web of interconnections. The reader is continually being asked to look in two directions, to link the individual with society, loss with creativity, the inner with the outer world, religion with science, and the past with the future. What perhaps separates this work from others of its genre is that in bridge-building the author is not concerned with static structures but with process, and there is a lively sense of movement and development in inner and outer space and time.
The book is divided into three parts. The first introduces the central theme of loss, mourning and creativity in the life of Freud, by examining his personal history and self-analysis. The ability to mourn is shown in Freud's relationship with a number of representative figures in his life: examples are given of his father, Fliess and Jung. The stages in this process are described as identification, idealisation and narcissistic merger, followed by a painful period of de-idealisation and disillusionment leading to Homan's key concept of mourning and turning inwards for new values and new psychological structure. Through self-analysis Freud is seen as creating a space for this process, allowing him an eventual rapproachment with the social world. This process in Freud is seen as the pregnancy of the psychoanalytic movement and is Homan's prototype for describing creative achievement in other historical figures.
Part II widens the context, relating the social origins of psychoanalysis to the concept of disillusionment. It follows the process of disillusionment, mourning a