Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. G. Makari. New York:  Harper Collins Publishers, 2008.  624 pp.

George Makari has written a very readable history of the creation and evolution of psychoanalysis until the mid-1940s. Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis presents a satisfying scientific summary and occasionally shocking revelation of the human brilliance and foibles that are the matrix of psychoanalytic theory, practice, and technique.

Makari begins in France at the time that Freud arrived to undertake his studies with Charcot—placing Freud squarely in the context of the intellectual and political crucible of the latter half of the 19th century. Making a quick tour through scientific rationalism, psychologie nouvelle, associational psychology, Auguste Comte's positivism, Th$eAodule Ribot's studies in heredity and its relationship to psychological functioning, and Jean-Martin Charcot's studies in neurology and hysteria, Makari reveals that Paris was a Mecca for anyone interested in exploring the questions of the human mind. He detours briefly to Vienna and the educational and ideational influences Freud had been exposed to there. Sketching the sociopolitical landscape of Europe in the latter half of the 19th century, where scientific rationalism was rising as the religious authority was fading in the context of a new political and social force in France, Freud is revealed as a man embedded in a particular time and place, and steeped in the intellectual and scientific traditions and controversies of that time. The imprint of that time and place will be prominent throughout the rest of Makari's exposition of the creation