Discovering The Mind, Volume Three: Freud Versus Adler and Jung. Walter Kaufmann. New York:  McGraw-Hill, 1980.  xvii + 494 pp.

Freud versus Adler and Jung is the third and final volume of Walter Kaufmann's trilogy, Discovering the Mind. The efforts of Goethe and Nietzsche to develop a viable yet poetic science of the mind, which were described in the previous volumes, are seen in this volume as culminating in Freud's work. For Kaufmann, Adler's and Jung's contributions are of intellectual interest only in so far as they point up the superiority of Freud's ideas.

Kaufmann begins by outlining Freud's major contributions, foremost of which is the development of a science of the mind combining the sensitivity of a poet with the rigor of a scientist. Freud offers us bold hypotheses without the comfort of a theory that formulates general laws or makes precise predictions with the help of mathematics. Freud spurned the obscurity of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Buber and also rejected the safety of psychological quantification and statistics. In his list of Freud's discoveries, Kaufmann eschews technical terms such as unconscious, resistance, ego, and superego. For Kaufmann, Freud is important for the way in which he advanced our understanding of the mind rather than for the specific terms and analytic concepts he used to explain his discoveries. The resulting list is not likely to impress psychoanalysts, but it is interesting to see how a scholar who claims no personal experience of psychoanalysis summarizes Freud's major discoveries. Kaufmann's list includes Freud's stress on the importance of childhood experiences. He also sees Freud as emancipating the mentally ill by pointing out the psychopathology of everyday life and the fact that mental illness belongs on a continuum from illness to normality. Kaufmann credits Freud with restoring innocence to sex, and with lessening our sense of guilt not just about sex but also about our feelings of hatred toward those whom we ought to love. Finally, Kaufmann stresses Freud's honesty. With the knowledge Freud gained of himself through self-analysis, he cou