Despite its shortcomings this book is a valuable addition to the psychoanalytic library. In a series of essays, the volume sketches the lives and contributions of forty individuals who have played a more or less decisive role in the growth and development of Freud's original work. Two additional essays present historical reviews of psychoanalysis in England and in the United States.

As a source of biographical data the work fills a void in a field which has been dominated by the towering image of one man. This has tended to relegate the image of some of Freud's early followers to a position of relative obscurity. As a consequence, members of that first generation of psychoanalytic pioneers—(pioneers of psychoanalysis would have been a more felicitous term)—are known to contemporary analysts chiefly as names attached to certain theoretical formulations, as authors of well-known books and papers, or as the principals in certain celebrated psychoanalytic controversies. The