Language and Insight. The Sigmund Freud Memorial Lectures 1975-1976, University College London: By Roy Schafer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978. 208 pp.

If Freud had been less strongly drawn toward philosophy, psychoanalysis might be less plagued with philosophical problems. Thanks to a recent discovery,1 we know that during his years of intensive study with Brentano he seriously considered philosophy as a career. He finally turned away from this early love, and his comments about philosophy in his published works are uniformly negative, so much

so that if they had been made by anyone else, many an analyst would have suspected their defensive origin.

It seems plausible to conclude that Freud studiously neglected to address such philosophical issues as the mind-body problem, or the seeming paradox of freedom in a deterministic world, whenever they arose. Yet unexamined antinomies, epistemological and metaphysical inconsistencies, and methodological Schlamperei underlay many of the persisting difficulties of psychoanalytic theory. It is only in quite recent years that analysts are beginning to become aware of these issues, and Roy Schafer deserves a good deal of thanks for so persistently discussing questions of this kind in a series of papers, a large and controversial book (A New Language for Psychoanalysis),2 and now a briefer but no less thoughtful and meaty one.

A review of reasonable length cannot do justice to the many difficult theoretical and philosophical issues Schafer raises, particularly because he does not defend many of his positions in detail but refers the reader elsewhere for such defense—principally to works of the British school of action philosophers. I cannot attempt to review and rebut Ryle, Davidson, Melden, and the other authors he leaned on in his earlier book. I will merely note that the most recent philosophical work cited in Language and Insight dates from 1963. Since then the work of Ryle has come under increasing criticism from within philosophy, and many