The Complete Correspondence Of Sigmund Freud And Ernest Jones. 1908-1939.: Edited by R. Andrew Paskauskas. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1993. 836 pp.

The world of university scholarship remains at too great a distance from the teaching of psychoanalysis, and therefore when a book like the Freud-Jones letters appears, one is left more than a little uncertain about where to begin describing it. Analysts in training read certain key papers by Freud, and then a batch of texts usually written by geographically notable analysts. The work of intellectual historians, alas, is too rarely considered relevant to understanding the psychoanalytic past. If one travels around the world, visiting various centers of psychoanalytic training, it is possible to sense just how parochial the educational situation is apt to be. There is also the special problem of alleged Freud-bashing; trying to understand Freud's work in its historical context, or even reading his writings in the light of the various enemies he was trying to contend with, can lead to being tarred with the dread brush of being stigmatized as anti-psychoanalytic. To outsiders, for example within the increasingly powerful world of biological psychiatry, this sort of persistent sectarianism has been held responsible for holding back the development of psychoanalysis as a science.

University life has its own special problems. For example, Freud's popularity right now is riding high within literary and philosophical circles, but it is hard to get such people to realize the kinds of clinical concerns that a practicing analyst like Freud necessarily had. Intellectuals are capable of coming up with some of the most tortured readings of Freud imaginable, without understanding either the underlying continuities or the central controversies that have taken place in the past. Yet the study of the history of psychoanalysis has not gained legitimization within academic departments in universities any more than inside psychoanalytic training centers. As a result, there is a regrettable degree of amateurish writing that appears in print.

With all that has already come out about Freud,