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The book under review is the second volume of two. The first is entitled Core Concepts in Classical Psychoanalysis (2018) and covers the foundation concepts of both a general theory of mental processes (“how the mind works”) and their clinical application.
The above description, when applied to both volumes, is not completely accurate. If Breuer and Freud's Studies on Hysteria (1893-1895), and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900) are the foundation of what had already become a research method (the parameters of the analytic situation), a technical research instrumentation (free association), the findings yielded by the research procedure, and the formulation of a (complex) body of abstract theory, then the two volumes actually constitute a critique of psychoanalysis as a whole, and especially its therapeutic application. But the word “critique” is not to be confused with the word “criticism,” as used in everyday speech. Critique is here used in the same sense as, for instance, literary or historical criticism; that is, as an expansion of understanding and a weighing of the intellectual, stylistic, and truth value of a text or set of ideas. There are only a few thinkers who, it can be claimed, have laid down a new field of science and inquiry: Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and Freud, and their writings have generated a vast critical literature.
Eagle, a foremost contributor to the more thoughtful, careful, and precise criticism of psychoanalysis, has devoted his career to an extensive evaluation of the basic (Freudian) concepts, and of the wide-ranging newer formulations that have issued from these paradigmatic and foundational ideas and theories. His deeply knowledgeable and penetrating analysis of these basic concepts and their later derivatives is of great and lasting value to psychoanalysis: He is one of our few consummate critics, in the best sense of that word.