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Nathan Hale's remarkable book is more than the astute depiction of particular events, ideas, personalities, and cultures in the history of psychoanalysis in America; it is more because Hale's account of psychoanalysis in the United States from 1917 to 1985 illustrates certain universale in necessity and human nature. This quality in Hale's book elevates it to a level of knowledge that shows us how we go about creating and destroying what we value in life. M. I. Finley (1970) noted in his introduction to Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War that
a mere retelling of individual events in sequence, no matter how accurate and precise, would just be that and nothing more. It could be exciting, moving, scandalous, entertaining—but would it be important, would it be worth the pain and effort of a lifetime? Greek intellectuals like Thucydides…believed that knowledge for its own sake was meaningless, its mere accumulation a waste of time. Knowledge must lead to understanding. In the field of history, even when largely restricted to contemporary history, that meant trying to grasp general ideas about human behavior, in war and politics, in revolution and government. Thucydides' problem was to move from the particular to the universal, from the concrete and unique event to the underlying patterns and generalities, from a single revolution to revolution in essence, from a demagogue like Cleon to the nature of demagogues, from specific instances of power politics to power itself. (pp. 24-25)
In the tradition of Thucydides, Jacob Burckhardt (1958), Edward Gibbon (1962), Oswald Spengler (1926-1928), and Arnold J. Toynbee (1946), Hale suggests that the seeds for the crisis and possible decline of psychoanalysis are contained in the means used to achieve its success in America.
When Hale asks, “What accounts for the extraordinary rise and pervasiveness of psychoanalysis in American culture?” (p. 380), his question is analogous to Gibbon's description of the factors contributing