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I am not sure exactly what it says about a field when an important book is as excruciatingly painful to have to read as this one is; but I suspect that altogether too many psychoanalytic books get bought and then put unperused on impressively filled shelves. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique has attracted a lot of general book-reviewing attention; in behalf of its significance the editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association published an editorial for which I can recall no precedent; and an issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences contained a precis of the book along with commentary from 38 experts, as well as a reply by Grünbaum.
Psychoanalysis has always had at best an uncertain relationship with universities. Training institutes have by and large not been connected with normal academic institutions, and liberals within the psychoanalytic movement have long thought that the isolation of analysis from university life perpetuated sectarianism and ideological intolerance. Adolf Grünbaum is a trained philosopher who has come also to hold a research professorship in a department of psychiatry; so on the face of it one would expect to be able to welcome his contribution to our understanding of psychoanalysis.
Unfortunately, however, what we have here is a demolition job, a work of intellectual fanaticism. Grünbaum uses the equipment