This book's angry, snide, contemptuous tone and its pretentious style coupled with constant exaggeration, occasional factual errors, and ignorance of fairly elementary clinical realities, all make it easy to dismiss. Most analysts who pick it up will be offended, perhaps insulted, and will shrug it off as another resistance-motivated attack.

That would be a mistake. For, despite its many faults—which include several of the very errors in argument for which Wilcocks accurately indicts Freud—it contains a literature professor's shrewd and knowing analysis of the rhetorical devices by which the old master silences doubt, circumvents skepticism, and gives the appearance of proof and objectivity without their substance. The author also exposes several hitherto unnoticed instances in which