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This volume is one of a series devoted to the evaluation of leading figures in the social sciences whose influence has been significant and whose impact continues to be felt. The series has presented collections of selected essays by social scientists on Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and others, a group among which Sigmund Freud is somewhat an outsider. Freud's scientific contribution was not to the social sciences in the same manner as Durkheim, Weber, or Marx. Rather, his writings in the field of social science were examples of applied psychoanalysis or highly speculative efforts. This particular volume is also to be differentiated from others in the series in that all the essayists but one hold no credentials as experts in the area which was central to the 'Maker's' thinking. Only Erik Erikson, among those represented, has any familiarity with clinical psychoanalysis and the theory based upon the application of the psychoanalytic method in the clinical setting. Thus, the book is more a testament to the breadth of Freud's interests than to the central position of the field in his own repertoire.
Included among the ten papers are Jerome Bruner's Freud and the Image of Man, already printed elsewhere, a preliminary paper of Erikson's on Gandhi and aggression which was subsequently incorporated and expanded in his book, Gandhi's Truth, and a discussion of neo-Freudian revisionism as defended by Erich Fromm and criticized by Herbert Marcuse. The reader who approaches the collection from a grounding in psychoanalysis may well find most enlightening the paper by T. W. Adorno, Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist