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This is an interesting book that leaves a strong impression of the quality of the author's scholarship and analysis, but it does get off to a slow start; because of the excellence of what it ultimately has to offer, readers ought to be warned not to be put off by the opening chapters. It seems to me unfortunate that Martin Wain begins by hurriedly giving a potted history of Western culture in the nineteenth century, which seems largely to rely on estimable books by Peter Laslett and E. P. Thompson. I doubt that the genuine historical setting for the impact of Freud's work can be enhanced by Wain relying on a few such famed secondary sources. Nor does Freud's Answer offer original insights into the biographical specifics of Freud's creation of psychoanalysis.
To move to the real strengths of Freud's Answer, Wain is most persuasive about the social fit between Freud's work and the culture around him, and Wain is acute about the world that has followed Freud's death. Some such lines of explanation will surely help make more understandable why psychoanalysis was able to have such an enormous impact over this past century. Wain seems to believe, and I think he is on sound ground here, that in many ways Freud's psychology, despite its emancipatory-sounding slogans, also served to reinforce social controls that relied on psychology's buttressing. The loss of traditional religious beliefs and other sources of social identities fed insecurities that psychoanalysis helped alleviate.
There is nothing in Freud's Answer that sounds like any of the Freud-bashing that has become so trendy in the English-speaking world. Yet I wonder whether it would not be desirable to critique some of the alternatives to Freudian thinking, options that lie outside the boundaries of what Wain feels most comfortable considering. Yes, the psychoanalytic worldview, taken in its broadest meaning, did lead to many conformist practices. But does Wain think that the discovery of neurotransmitters, and the r