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The Existentialist Critique of Freud: The Crisis of Autonomy. . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. 354 pp.
This is an excellent book which elucidates both Freud's frame of thought within the tradition of rationalism and positivism, and the existential critique of Freud—as begun by Ludwig Binswanger who, significantly, was the only dissident of Freud's views with whom he maintained a lifelong, amicable relationship. It explains and evaluates the psychological approaches grounded on the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, as arrived at by Binswanger himself, and by M. Boss and J.-P. Sartre. As such, the book should hold special interest for those concerned with psychoanalysis in Freud's own broad sense of an anthropology, or science of man. In terms of direct clinical interest, however, its publication appears somewhat past due. The author not only recognizes this, but also suggests the particular value of the book in his preface:
It is only after I was well into the revision of my original manuscript that I became familiar with the large body of post-Freudian psychoanalysis and discovered that certain characteristic concerns of existential psychology had been incorporated within the Freudian framework through its extension into the pre-oedipal period of development and into the psychopathological manifestations of the developmental disturbances of this period that are found in borderline and narcissistic illness. The sharp opposition between existentialism and contemporary psychoanalysis on this score is therefore not warranted…. The psychoanalytic interest in the existential themes of pre-oedipal pathology is itself a historical development, which was antedated by their description in existentialism.
Modern existential philosophy beginning with Kierkegaard was, in fact, the first “unmasking psychology,” and disclosed issues that