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Perhaps no more important individual lives among us to-day than Freud. One who has, by his genius, opened up more new avenues of research, thought and speculation the end of which no one can foresee. Therefore, any work dealing with his life and work, particularly one that essays to give some insight into his personal characteristics and intimate thought and life, is most welcome as calculated to illumine a personality of rapidly increasing importance.
Wittels' book is first and foremost most interestingly, indeed one may say entertainingly, written. One interested in the subject will, if he chances to pick it up, not lay it aside unfinished. It is a smoothly flowing history of the psychoanalytic movement as it unfolded itself in the mind of its founder and an account of some of the results that flowed from this development especially so far as they concerned him personally.
The book not only gives an intimate sketch of the master, his early days and the influence upon him of his teachers, but the evolution of some of the more important of the psychoanalytic tenets (anxiety neurosis, narcissism, bipolarity, etc.) together with the author's views thereon, but also outlines his relations with his three principal pupils, Adler, Jung, and Stekel, devoting a chapter to each and giving the causes that led up to his final break with them.
The book is excellently translated and with the exception of Freud's own history of the psychoanalytic movement, is the best historical account of psychoanalysis available.