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In this latest entry into our collection of “Review of Reviews,” we are asking the reader to empathize with those of us who are trying to synthesize and highlight the similarities and differences between several reviews of the same book; it is difficult enough to write a single review even if you feel strongly about the topic and the volume you are reviewing. This new feature of the journal is intended to aid the reader in viewing a volume from several different vantage points, as well as highlighting theoretical and empirical differences that abound in our field. It is our hope that in highlighting these differences new bridges can be formed.
The book to be featured is Joel Whitebook's, Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Whitebook, 2017). We will look at four reviews of this book from psychoanalytic journals. We also reference three reviews from literary and historical journals. The reviews to be discussed are Lois Oppenheim's (2018) review that was published in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association; Elizabeth Rottenberg's (2019) review that appeared in Psychoanalysis and History; and the essay by Henry Zvi Lothane (Lothane, 2018) that was published in International Forum of Psychoanalysis. A review by Morris Eagle (2019) appeared in this journal. Paul Keegan's review in the London Review of Books (Keegan, 2017), John Toew's in Modern Intellectual History , and Jerald Izenberg's in Journal of Modern History (Izenberg, 2019) are the literary and historical reviews. There was a review in a Dutch journal, which we will unfortunately not include. Before looking at the different reviews we will provide a summary of the pivotal issues that Whitebook raises. Several reviews simultaneously reviewed Roudinesco's and Crews's biographies of Freud.
Whitebook (2017) writes that he is both a “philosopher and psychoanalyst.”1 His biography, while lengthy, does not attempt to be a comprehensive mapping of Freud's entire life. Rather, Whitebook focuses particularl