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Robert Holt is sharing with his readers a most enjoyable personal, intellectual, and psychoanalytic journey in this collection of fourteen of his papers, which he has carefully reviewed and occasionally revised. There seem to be a number of motivations in his creating this book. First, it represents a recapitulation and integration of his own thinking, reviewing the passage he has made that has led him to his present stage of looking toward a new integrative world hypothesis, as he finds the current status of psychoanalytic theory unsatisfactory. Second, he expresses the hope—which I feel is quite justified—that in sharing some of his struggles in trying to understand Freud, he might be able to ease the way of those students and scholars who find themselves at an earlier point on the same journey. At the same time, he clearly states that a reading of this book will not substitute for a reading of Freud in the original, and that certainly is the case. However, I must say that there will be points when the reading of Freud for the first time or maybe for the second time can be aided by readers' having this Holt volume with them as a companion piece.
As Holt shares his own intellectual history with us, he is explicit in saying that he has in mind writing an intellectual history of