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Every year a number of articles or books seem to appear whose titles disturb the sleep of the practicing psychoanalyst. He might be led to wonder whether his profession is founded on false ideas, is dying, or is already dead and entombed. In November 1993, Time magazine (Adler, 1993) wondered “Is Freud Dead?” Newsweek (Gray & Blackman, 2006) answered in March 2006 that “Freud Is Not Dead.” In the meantime, Webster (1995) had declared Freud unscientific in Why Freud Was Wrong, while Dufresne, who had already buried Freud in Tales from the Freudian Crypt (2000), finally killed him off in Killing Freud: Twentieth Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis (2003). However, the persistence of certain psychoanalytic truths for more than 100 years has enabled Freud's ideas not only to survive, but to outlive the greatly exaggerated rumors of their demise.
The books under review concern the nature of the psychoanalytic enterprise (The Crisis in Psychoanalysis) and the stature of psychoanalysis as a living idea in a crowded forum of therapeutic ideas (Freud's Foes). Both books are written by partisans of psychoanalysis, the former with the intent of calling attention to doctrinal problems in the current state of psychoanalysis, the latter with the purpose of fending off the critics of psychoanalysis by pointing out the flaws in their arguments. Both books are concerned with the history of psychoanalysis albeit in different ways. Whereas Fayek studies the history of psychoanalysis to account for the “crisis” and to suggest a way out of it, Jacobsen studies this history to reassert the legitimacy of psychoanalysis as a philosophy and as a therapeutic procedure.