In this interesting and valuable monograph, Hannah S. Decker has concentrated on a single historical issue and has persuasively resolved the problems that this issue raises. As all students of Sigmund Freud know, and as Decker reminds us throughout her book, Freud felt very much alone, especially during the years of his epoch-making discoveries and his first major publications—the years roughly covered by this book: 1893 to 1907. The reasons for this isolation have seemed too obvious to require much documentation: the shocking nature of Freud's theories and his radical departure from current psychological theories and dominant ethical values, exacerbated by Freud's being Jewish. "Be assured," Freud wrote to Karl Abraham in 1908, in a famous letter, "if my name were Oberhuber, my innovations would have encountered far less resistance, despite everything"1—"everything" being, of course, Freud's insistence on the