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A work of value to those already deeply immersed in the history of psychoanalysis that can function equally well as a vivid, engaging, and compelling introduction for the novice is an unusual achievement. Avoiding polemics and partisanship, lacking nothing in details and information while never losing sight of a larger context that is convincingly evoked—and as vividly written as a work of scholarship is allowed to be— Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis is an important work.
Much information about our discipline's past, written from the perspectives of the social sciences and history, has preceded Makari's work, and many notable psychoanalysts have contributed their own stories. Whether trying to critique a variably defined psychoanalysis, expand it, or enlist the field in the service of a larger goal, many such works are constrained by their own often unacknowledged intellectual, political, or historical perspectives. Makari is a practicing psychoanalyst, but he is also an accomplished and sophisticated historian of science, and he presents a richly contextualized history of the early years of psychoanalysis, through the Second World War, that follows the interplay of personal, social, and scientific factors that shaped Freud and his followers, as well as the larger tapestry of world events within which the story unfolded.
Makari writes with acute recognition of the fact that he is writing a history of a field that itself has constantly reframed its own history, content, claims, and scope, and has also revised the very understanding of authority, science, and systems of knowledge. We see how the body of ideas that came to encompass psychoanalysis came into being—a corpus that is as rich as it is inconsistent. Makari writes:
Sigmund Freud was a brilliant synthetic thinker, but he was, by his own admission, not a coherent system builder. He did not tie up the loose ends or repudiate the former theories he
Page 589later seemed to contradict. … By 1930, a series