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This reviewer is most favorably impressed with the scholarly and careful study that resulted in this book. The author not only presents in a very lucid way the tentative and cautious beginnings of the psychoanalytic movement in the medical profession of the United States, but with deep understanding and sensitivity he presents the sociological and intellectual currents at the beginning of this century that enhanced or hindered the progress of the new science. He brilliantly elucidates what he calls the complexity of a historical study of this type by dealing with 'three themes that are sometimes separable, sometimes not. One is the actual process by which American physicians came to learn about psychoanalysis. A second is the preparation and circumstances that account for the fact that attention given psychoanalysis was as favorable as it was. Finally, there are the particular factors that accounted for resistance to Freud's ideas or that caused them to be misunderstood and distorted' (p. 214). In his presentation Burnham blends the three themes in masterful fashion.
For the psychoanalyst it is fascinating to follow the vicissitudes of his science starting from the year 1893 when On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication by Breuer and Freud was abstracted by William James in Psychological Review. After a first flickering of interest there came a period of neglect from 1896 until 1904. In 1905 Adolf Meyer, who occupied a central position in American psychiatry, began to disseminate psychoanalytic ideas. In 1906 the term 'psychoanalysis' appeared in print for the first time and James Putnam published the first article dealing specifically with Freud's work. From then on the interest grew steadily, A. A. Brill being most prominent as a pioneer of the new science. In 1908 Ernest Jones, then in Toronto, became an ardent and aggressive propagator of psychoanalysis during his frequent visits to Boston. Freud visited the Unite