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Paul Roazen's fourth book on the topic of psychoanalysis confronts us with a new phenomenon: the emergence of a scholar without formal psychoanalytic training who nevertheless devotes the major effort of his academic life to the study of our discipline. As a community,
we are bound to respond to this development with ambivalence: on the one hand, it attests to our achievement of intellectual respectability; on the other hand, it projects into the public arena views allegedly identified with our cause that most of us find alien, distasteful, or even bizarre.
Roazen's Brother Animal1 aroused a storm of indignation from psychoanalysts because he used our reconstructive tools in a clumsy and tendentious manner to make a case against Freud for his dealings with Victor Tausk. Roazen stretched his evidence to paint a portrait of Freud that struck many serious students of the history of psychoanalysis as a piece of character assassination. Written by an author with Roazen's record, a book focused on the topic of Freud's relations with his followers can only arouse trepidation.
As it turns out, however, this volume will create hardly a stir. Roazen writes smoothly, he has been industrious, and he recounts the familiar events with competence. Readers who recall the previous work of Jones, Schur, and Ellenberger and the book titled Psychoanalytic Pioneers2 will find little that is new here. In fact, Roazen follows these sources so closely that for long stretches one tends to lose track of the rationale for pouring this old wine into a new bottle. One can only regret that, while he went about summarizing the biographical data on Freud and his circle, Roazen failed to consider a substantial body of recent work on the subject in the periodical literature of psychoanalysis.
The author's explanation for having undertaken his study seems disingenuous. He had spent a great deal of time and energy in interviewing Freud's surviving patients and students, and he had gained acce