“The Boy will come to Nothing!”: Freud's Ego ideal and Freud as Ego Ideal. By Leonard Shengold. New Haven and London:  Yale University Press. 1993. Pp.  xvi plus; 184.

In this, his fourth book, Leonard Shengold addresses a problem of fundamental importance to all students and practitioners of psychoanalysis: Freud's function as an object of transference for those who emulate him in making psychoanalysis their life's work. As indicated by his subtide, Dr. Shengold approaches this problem from a double vantage point. A sequence of chapters examining the identifications that helped to form Freud's own ego ideal and their ramifications in his personal relationships is framed by opening and closing chapters that reflect on Freud's status as an ego ideal for his legatees. Dr. Shengold's biographical chapters contribute substantially to psychoanalytic scholarship, but it is his willingness to raise the issue of Freud's place in the fantasies of his followers that gives this book its greatest interest.

Dr. Shengold is commendably honest about his own complicity in the process of transference that he describes. As a student at Columbia University, he acknowledges that he idealized Lionel Trilling “completely uncritically” as a “living Freud” (p. 1). But although Dr. Shengold deserves credit for his forthrightness, the excessive idealization that he manifested toward Trilling likewise extends to his view of Freud.

Lionel Trilling was, of course, a major critic, and no one did more than he to secure the acceptance of psychoanalysis in post-World War II American