Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc by Malcolm Macmillan Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1997,  xxiii + 762 pp., $35.00

Having long been an admirer of Malcolm Macmillan's excellent papers on the early history of psychoanalysis, when his book appeared in 1991 I read it with eager anticipation. I laid it down some weeks later (slow going!) with very mixed feelings: such a lot of valuable critique of Freud's theories, but such a poorly edited book, marred by so many minor confusions, misunderstandings, lapses of logic, and excesses of negative judgment that I thought it unlikely to be read by those who needed it most—the Freudian faithful. Again, when I learned that the MIT Press had brought out a new, paperback edition of the same book, I hoped that it had had a thorough revision and editing. I can report that it is much better proof-read than before; virtually all of the typos I had spotted before have quietly been corrected (although some new ones are here), and missing references have been supplied. The prose has been smoothed up somewhat, also, though there are still occasional phrases (Australianisms? like “put paid”) that may baffle American readers, and most of the passages I had marked as hard to understand have not been altered. For example, on page 309 he comments: “rather than the object of the sexual drive being pictured as something external to the individual, the childhood object of each drive had to be named as the individual”—an awkward way of saying it is autoerotic. Moreover, some factual errors have not been corrected, for example, that Einstein congratulated Freud on his ninetieth birthday (p. 595). But these are minor flaws.

This time, it comes with a foreword by one famous reader, Frederick Crews, who has previously declared it “exhaustive and learned” (Crews, 1995, p. 10) and who has relied on it (along with Grünbaum's books) as the principal backing for his own widely publicized attacks on psychoanalysis, because it displays “the most meticulous scholarship ever bestowed on Freud's claims”