The Logic of Explanation in Psychoanalysis: By Michael Sherwood. New York: Academic Press, Inc., 1969. 276 pp.

We are still in the midst of an unsettled debate, a debate that has existed at least from the beginning of the eighteenth century—whether there is a separate science of mind. It is possible to claim that man, unlike other animals, is a history-producing creature, one who creates his own environment and hence is not simply 'in nature' as are other animals. If this is true, is there a logic that separates the human sciences from the other sciences (human sciences include psychoanalysis as well as psychology, anthropology, and sociology)? Can a case be made for the existence of a 'separate domain'?

Michael Sherwood, a psychiatrist who has had training in philosophy at Oxford, has addressed himself to this fundamental question, but has approached it exclusively from the perspective of the Oxford school of linguistic analysis. He has chosen (perhaps wisely) as his text Freud's Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis—the Rat Man. The reader is presented with a careful and detailed paraphrase of Freud's case history. Later in this monograph he subjects specific sentences to a form of logical analysis of which the following is a typical example:

• 1Lorenz (the rat man) hates his father and wishes to be unlike him, according to the way in which he, Lorenz, perceives him.

• 2Lorenz perceives his father as being a spendthrift.

• 3Therefore, Lorenz desires to be a miser, i.e., a 'nonspendthrift.'

For convenience we can drop the references to Lorenz's perception, since they make no difference to the logic of the argument, and we can adopt some obvious symbols to schematize the statements:

• 1L. desires to be a member of class 'unlike-F.'

• 2Members of class 'unlike-F' have property 'non-S.'