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Reading this book could be a worthwhile challenge to modern analysts. It is heavily philosophical, highly scholarly, influenced by the writer's extensive scientific training and experience and, ultimately, might provide modern psychoanalysts with a more solid foundation of theory for our technical work with patients than any other psychoanalytic theory.
Robert Holt, an internationally known Freud scholar, who has himself been challenging psychoanalytic theoreticians over the past three decades, has written a comprehensive and authoritative critique of the fundamental theory of psychoanalysis. The book jacket informs us that “it is more comprehensive than other works on Freud's attempts to construct a scientific theory and more systematic in its consideration of all aspects of metapsychology; and that it will be required reading for all serious students of psychoanalytic theory. Beginning students will find that it explains and clarifies much of what is mystifying and difficult to understand in Feud's work, while the most advanced scholars will be challenged to take a position on Holt's call for fundamental reform.”
Holt introduces the book with a reference to Erich Fromm. Holt says, “Erich Fromm once remarked, in a seminar I attended over 40 years ago, that Freud and Marx had this in common: both were the indispensable starting point for students of their respective subject matters, although practically everything they said was wrong.” Such is the dramatic hyperbole of Holt's book. Yet, the reader must feel the deep love and admiration Holt feels for Freud. Holt writes:
And yet Freud is much more than an historical figure. Again, Fromm was right: he is the indispensable starting point for any serious student of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy … not as a source of infalliable wisdom, for there is none such to be found anywhere; not as an intellectual father to be swallowed whole in a fantasied act of magical identification; and not as a generator of propositions that ca