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The Oxford University Press has sponsored a series of books about men whom they label as “Past Masters.” These are “leading intellectual figures of the past whose ideas still influence the way we think today.” Sigmund Freud clearly qualifies as a Past Master, and Anthony Storr was selected as his biographer. Storr is a British psychiatrist who is a well-known author and especially well qualified to write about Freud and his life and works.
In this book, a mere 135 pages, Storr manages to write in an animated and scholarly style about Freud's important psychoanalytic concepts. He not only outlines Freud's pioneering work in establishing psychoanalysis, but also makes a difficult but fair judgment on which of Freud's ideas remain valid.
We need only turn to the first page of this book to become aware of how diplomatically Storr handles modern Freudian controversy. He writes that Freud's “mother Amalie was the third wife of Jacob Freud…” By making this statement without any further explanation, Storr is siding with those Freudian scholars who have uncovered documentation that Jacob Freud married his second wife (named Rebekka) some time around 1852. As recently as 15 years ago all Freudian biographers wrote that Amalie was Jacob Freud's second wife. Storr undoubtedly believes that whether Amalie is Jacob Freud's second or third wife is not of critical importance to this book and therefore it is not worth any extended discussion. Storr arbitrarily makes other similar decisions, which reduces unnecessary polemics and makes the book smoother to read.
A few of the significant points that Storr brings out about Freud include that he did not discover the unconscious but showed how influential a role it played in the personality and actions of all