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Nathan G. Hale, Jr., has brought an extraordinary degree of nonpartisan scholarship to bear on the contentious history of psychoanalysis
in America. His 1971 Freud and the Americans, now at last reprinted, carried the story until 1917, and has become a standard source for historians and other students of the reception of psychoanalytic doctrines in the United States. One way of judging a book is in terms of how often it has been necessary to use it over the years as a point of reference; on numerous occasions I have turned, each time with benefit, to look something up, especially about pre-Freudian psychiatry, in Hale's Freud and the Americans.
The strength of Freud and the Americans lies in its fair-mindedness and its extraordinary array of details; it concludes with a splendid bibliographic essay. By and large, this first volume of Hale's lifework was a success story, as he showed how Freud's system displaced the relatively less enlightened thinking of his American predecessors. For my own taste I would have preferred it if Hale had been knowledgeable enough to put the American reaction to psychoanalysis within some comparative cultural framework. One can better understand America's take on Freud if one also knows something, for instance, of how he was faring at the time in Britain, Germany, or France. But Hale's strong point is his close attention to the historical narrative, and it may be asking too much of him at the same time to be aware of the response to psychoanalytic theory and practice in different national contexts.
It has taken over two decades for Hale to complete the second volume of his study, which brings the reader down to 1985, but The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States seems to me an even better book than Volume I. Hale has searched through all kinds of manuscript collections and has also kept up-to-date on the secondary literature, which has proliferated since the original appearance of Freud and the Americans. In the years a