‘The Freud Files’ is a revised edition of the 2006 French publication ‘Le dossier Freud’. Sonu Shamdasani needs no introduction to analytical psychologists. His co-author may be less familiar to an English-speaking readership, although well-known in France as author of ‘Le livre noir de la psychanalyse’, a trenchant critique of psychoanalysis which became a best-seller in 2005. Although the style of the present book verges sometimes from commitment towards the polemical, the credentials of the authors and the scholarly presentation of the text (with almost one hundred pages of critical apparatus) indicates that it merits serious consideration as a work coming from the burgeoning independent academic critique of psychoanalysis. The publishers suggest on the back cover of the paperback edition that it raises questions such as: How did psychoanalysis attain its prominent cultural position? How did it eclipse rival