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This extraordinarily exciting and enlightening book should not be missed by students and teachers of psychoanalysis. It is another addition to a growing body of scholarly but iconoclastic literature that is slowly lifting the veil that enshrouds Sigmund Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis in a complex mythology. Freud and his movement, as well as the main body of psychoanalytic theory, are emerging in a new and clearer light, more firmly rooted in the scientific and intellectual currents of the time and relatively free of mystification.
Freud possessed an acute sense of history and his psychoanalytic methodology was essentially historical in nature. He likened psychoanalysis to archaeology. Nevertheless, whether because of or in spite of this, twice in his life (in 1885 and again in 1907) Freud completely destroyed all of his manuscripts, private diaries, notes, and correspondence, thus fostering the Freudian legend and myth of the hero: “I couldn't have matured or died without worrying about who would get hold of those old papers.” A major result of Freud's systematic destruction (repression) of his intellectual past was that, until recently, psychoanalysis appeared to have sprung full-blown from his own head.
It seems to have required an historian (the author of this book is a Harvard-trained historian of science) to undertake the painstaking work of recovering the countless historical artifacts and documentation upon which the book's conclusions rely. This monumental task