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Russell Davis begins this volume of Psychological Issues by bemoaning the neglected status of the concept of passivity in Freud's collected works. According to Davis, this concept played an ever-increasing role in Freud's thinking over time, although for some unspecified reason it has remained a highly underresearched topic of psychoanalytic scholarship to this day. In this monograph, Davis attempts to demonstrate how the concept evolved and, as he hopes to demonstrate, achieved a centrality in Freud's work. Davis begins his inquiry by asking, “What did Freud mean by passivity?” He does this by and large through a content analysis and numerical tabulation of Freud's use of the term and its closest synonyms, beginning with Freud's late 19th-century writings on the etiology of hysteria and tracing this development through his last writings on religion. The bulk of Davis's attention, however, is on the crucial 10-year period between the years 1905-1915, when Freud crystallized much of his thinking on such topics as repression and neurotic development. It was also during this period that Freud developed the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory, the Oedipus complex. Specifically, Davis goes to great lengths in tracing how Freud increasingly invoked the concept of passivity as an organizing principle in the inverted Oedipus complex. More important, he attempts to show how the evolution of this phenomenon reflected Freud's own personal conflicts with other crucial thinkers in his immediate circle of followers, most prominently Fleiss, Jung, and Adler. Davis's central tenet is that Freud's usage and understanding of passivity was influenced directly by his own emotionally charged and highly transferential object relations to these “defectors” and his subsequent need to overcome his “passive stance” in the face of their opposition to his theoretical formulations.