Freud as a Writer. Patrick Mahony. New York:  International Universities Press, 1982.  220 pp.

This intelligent, earnest, likable book could have been called Freud by a Writer. It's certainly apparent that Mahony is a professor of English and comparative literature (as well as a psychoanalyst), but probably the most interesting sections are those in which Freud's attitudes toward his writing and his readership are ever so gently teased out of his style and examined—and these passages could probably only have been written by one who has hunted over the same ground. The mental processes of a serious writer imagining and then addressing an audience are displayed, and so are the processes a thinking writer pursues to discover what he thinks—when the writer is his own audience. There is, then, the beginning of an education for an analytic writer here: though Freud's theoretical genius is presumably more valuable as an inspiration than as a model for most mortals, his writerly tact, clarity, and openness are surely not beyond aspiring to, at least. (So this book could also have been called Freud for a Writer.) In any case it's instructive and inspiring to observe Mahony the writer gamely and often triumphantly emulating these virtues of the master. He is not always successful, but then Freud had only to explicate the unfathomable mysteries of human nature, while Mahony attempts also (in passing) to clarify the likes of Lacan and Derrida. Indeed in analyzing Freud's work in the terms of several