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No one could ever accuse Alexander Grinstein of a deficiency in systematization or scope. He first became known to the psychoanalytic world outside Detroit, where he has practiced for many years, as the editor of the encyclopedic Index of Psychoanalytic Writings (Grinstein, 1956-1975). He put impressive scholarship and awesome patience into that work, which has become a basic bibliographic tool for psychoanalysts. His comprehensive bibliography, Sigmund Freud's Writings (Grinstein, 1977), has performed a similar, though smaller scale, service.
In 1968, however, taking off in a new and daring direction, he attempted nothing less than to reanalyze Freud's dreams. What set Grinstein's approach apart from that of others who have tried to supplement Freud's own analyses of his dreams was his inclusion of summaries of every literary work alluded to by Freud in the dream texts or in his associations and an explanation of every allusion to historical or current events. That book was devoted to an analysis of 19 dreams (from The Interpretation of Dreams) dating from 1895 to 1900, when most of the self-analysis took place and many of the great discoveries were made. He excluded “those whose significance is self-evident or where little can be added to their understanding at this time beyond what Freud himself indicated” (Grinstein, 1968, p. 16). A dozen years later, a second edition appeared, with some addenda to the interpretations based on new materials that had appeared in the meanwhile, but the organization of the book was not altered.
With the publication of the present volume, however, Grinstein reveals that he is pushing forward on an ambitiously expanded scheme. In Freud at the Crossroads, he goes back to 1892, and his purview is enlarged to take in not only dreams but correspondence, through 1906. He has now found it possible to reinterpret seven