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Paul Roazen, who at the time of the writing of this book, was a professor of social and political science at York University in Toronto, is well known to the psychoanalytic audience, having written a
number of controversial books about Freud and psychoanalysis. These include Freud: Political and Social Thought, biographies of Helene Deutsch and Erik Erikson, Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk, and Encountering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis, Freud and His Followers, as well as several others.
In this volume Roazen utilizes notes from interviews he obtained with noted psychoanalysts early in his career in the 1960's. Interviews were conducted with members of Freud's immediate and close family, as well as with some of those who worked very closely with him professionally in Europe.
The saga begins in the fall of 1964 when the author had just received a full-time faculty appointment at Harvard University after completing his doctoral training there in social science. It was then that he began attending a weekly clinical psychiatric seminar at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. There he was exposed to the clinical discussions of eminent psychiatrists, among whom were some outstanding psychoanalysts. He was thus inspired to pursue his interest in psychoanalysis, impressed by the preeminence of psychoanalytic thinking and the influence of prominent psychoanalysts in the leading academic psychiatric departments in the country. Roazen cogently comments on the unique cachet psychoanalysis enjoyed within psychiatry during the early 1960's in contrast to the contemporary scene in which preeminence has flowed to the exponents of biological psychiatry and psychopharmacology.
The book is annotated on a chapter-by-chapter basis, with specific references to literature citations, many of which are the author's own. This can be troubling at times, since various characterizations are offered and anecdotes are related which are attributed in the notes