Freud: The Fusion of Science and Humanism. The Intellectual History of Psychoanalysis: Edited by John E. Gedo and George H. Pollock. Psychological Issues, Volume IX, Nos. 2/3, Monograph 34/35. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1976. 452 pp.

This volume undertakes to trace the intellectual history of psychoanalysis back to the humanism of the Renaissance, with vistas beyond that to the "know thyself" of the Greeks. This line of development is also projected forward to a method for extending individual analysis to group behavior and history. An original and daring enterprise, it represents workshop collaboration and individual contributions by members of what may be called the contemporary Chicago School.

Most of the sixteen individual articles have appeared in the literature previously. Already linked by a common viewpoint, they are further integrated by commentaries of the editors and by an inspirational summing up by Heinz Kohut, whose influence has been pervasive throughout. An introductory chapter by Gedo and E. Wolf, "From the History of Introspective Psychology: The Humanist Strain," launches the themes that are to be developed as the work proceeds. Humanists are defined as "particular type(s) of intellectual(s) who, in addition to their classical learning, focused their professional activities within the areas of poetry, history and moral philosophy" in contrast to the more empirical disciplines of natural sciences and behavior (law). Gedo and Wolf find it "the essence of the analyst's activity to engage in self-analytic introspection, to use the tools of poetry and history, and to aim at moral self-improvement" (p. 12). Humanism is seen as reaching its pinnacle with Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), in whose teachings may be found points of comparison with psychoanalysis. Gedo and Wolf discover an antithetical figure in Descartes, whose application of natural sciences to psychology they hold to be disastrous, foreshadowing empiricism, experimental psychology, and behaviorism.

For this reviewer, such sketching of broad lines of development leaves problems that call for further definition. Was Freud really more prone to use poetry and to seek moral self-improvement than