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Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg have assembled an impressive group of clinicians and scholars to examine worldviews of some of the major psychoanalytic thinkers. Although space doesn't permit a discussion of each of the thinkers, there are some important themes running through the book and critical issues raised by several of the authors.
The editors have provided particularly thorough introductions to each of the chapters. These are useful as bridges into each of these very different thinkers. In each chapter, practicing psychoanalysts or scholars have been chosen to discuss each theory. In addition, Edith Kurzweil has provided an in-depth overview of psychoanalytic history, which provides additional bridging from traditional psychoanalytic ideas to the many divergent schools of thought represented in the book.
In a thought provoking way, the editors have saved Freud for the final chapter. Alan Bass has provided a well thought out and especially challenging insight into Freud. Bass points out that it is possible to understand Freud's idiosyncratic personal philosophy through a review of his writing on the nature of scientific thought, his sociologic observations, and his constant search for root causes. Bass, however, has chosen a much more challenging and perhaps interesting angle as he provocatively draws from Freud's writings on worldviews, “Weltanschauungen.” Using several sources, including “The Outline of Psychoanalysis,” “On Narcissism,” “The Question of Weltanschauung,” and modern physics, Bass argues that Freud opposed the idea that psychoanalysis could have a Weltanschauung. In fact perhaps one of the most original and essential ideas in Freud, the idea of defense, forces one to the conclusion