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Ulrike May-Tolzmann is a Bavarian clinical psychologist and IPA psychoanalyst working in private practice in Munich. During the seventies she had the good fortune to spend a year in New York, studying with Robert Holt, George Klein and their research team. This enabled her to contribute to a volume on the history of psychoanalysis in the world (in Eicke 1976): she wrote a very detailed chapter on the reception and development of psychoanalysis in the United States. The point of departure of her present contribution is the distinction which made David Rapaport's research group world-famous, i. e. that between Freud's metapsychology and his clinical theory. In his Psychoanalytic Theory: An Exploration of Essentials (1976) Klein had come to the since-then highly debated conclusion that we psychoanalysts, in clinical work with our patients, can simply do without Freud's metapsychology.
In the anthology of his main papers Freud Reappraised (1989) Holt articulated in great detail the same conclusion, that is, he condemned Freud's metapsychology as scientifically untenable. Whereas Freud's metapsychology was not only carefully explored in terms of its consistency and validity, but also reconstructed in its historical development by several authors (see, for example, Amacher 1965, Sulloway, 1979, etc.), this does not hold true for his clinical theory. When did Freud actually start developing his clinical theory? This is the question around which May-Tolzmann's book centers. She not only shows the early and clear shape it took in the years between 1894 and 1896, but also reconstructs the scientific climate and problems characterizing the field of neuropathology and psychiatry in the same years. The burning problem with which neuropathologists and psychiatrists were then concerned was a convincing and viable definition of the concept of neurosis, to which Freud's early clinical theory gave the first satisfying answer. This concise and very clearly written book is divided into