Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis

As someone who knew very little about the beginnings of psychoanalysis, I was delighted to come across this book. It filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge. Now I know how such names as Karl Jung, Otto Rank, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich and Melanie Klein were connected with Freud. George Makari's book is a painstakingly detailed account not only of the struggle of psychoanalysis to gain legitimacy in the scientific community, but also of the internal struggles among Freud and his disciples and their shifting positions on the subject of the unconscious. It is all exciting reading, believe it or not. Friends become enemies, followers become antagonists and innovators become heretics. And all this takes place against the backdrop of Hitler's rise to power and psychoanalysts are forced to take sides. This is an outstanding work that I would highly recommend to anyone with an interest in the Twentieth Century, which I believe will ultimately be known as "The Freudian Age." Five stars.

Flowing smooth and limpid as a mountain stream, this big readable book quickly overcomes the reader's resistance to still another piece about the origins of Psychoanalysis. Even if one got the book only because its author, Dr. George Makari, has already firmly established the excellence of his writing, one's faith is vindicated right away. It becomes hard to put the book down. Not only does Makari's book contain more information, a clearer and closer look at the issues and the personalities than any other history of this topic, but also it sheds welcome light on the forces bringing about the various dialectical theses, oppositions and revisions of belief in the field of Psychoanalysis, and neighboring fields. This is done in the context of those diverse forces (including an anti-Semitic Europe weary of its own sexual inhibition and its post-Kantian intellectual exhaustion, yet comfortably cloaked in Hapsburg elegance) which are instances of the forces which inevitably oppose any "Revolution in Mind." If the worth of a history can be scored not only by the number of facts it describes with illumination, but also by the number of times the reader has to stop and think, arresting any sense that, "I already knew that," this book is tops. It's the best history -- with respect for Ernest Jones, Peter Gay, Frank Sulloway and others -- of the origins of Psychoanalysis, and one of the best histories of any important intellectual or institutional development. Among its other virtues, Makari's book is an excellent study of the dialectical development of a set of beliefs from an initial thesis (or set of theses) to opposition and differentiation, to reformulation. The story is remarkably similar to the development of Christianity from a revolutionary "gospel" ("good news") to a "creed" which is the product of heated controversy, compromise and hard choices, and thence to a powerful stable institution. Makari's treatment of "The Question of Lay Analysis," in the context of the Freudian thesis of infantile sexuality, which invited eager quacks and charlatans to celebrate with a party of wild analysis, with the ideal of a staid and virtuously neutral "Science" being invoked in defense of orthodox Psychoanalysis, brings up for study the entire question of orthodoxy and authoritative credentials (like the MD), including public licensing for the protection of those whom P. T. Barnum would identify by saying, "A fool is born every minute." Just a few centuries before Freud, ironically, anyone pleading "Science" in defense of an unorthodox belief might get burnt at the stake. The history told by Makari made the plea of "Science" the only available defense to Freud and Psychoanalysts, as pleading Philosophy or Poetry might get them burnt at the stake not by ecclestical authority but by academic authority, and to plead "Listening with the Third Ear" could get them committted to an insane asylum. Today in America, the use of the MD as the requisite c

Revolution in Mind What a wonderful book! After a reader's diet consisting almost entirely of Freud based polemics of one sort or another, here is an elegantly written overview of the field of psychoanalysis that is a pleasure to read. The first sentence in the book, "When the twenty-nine year-old doctor stepped off the train in the fall of 1895, he was a failure", gives a hint of the palpable humanity that will follow. George Makari is a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, but he is essentially an historian with the breadth of mind and perspective that is that discipline at its best. At almost five hundred pages, absent notes, it is far too short! Makari whets the appetite with the range of his intellect as he scans such diverse fields of study at the end of the nineteenth century as psychophysics, sexology, neuroanatomy, hypnosis, psychopathology, psychotherapy, evolutionary biology, etc., weaving together the variety of views of psyche and soma that will come together in this "revolution in mind", but as he does so he sprinkles about vignettes of so many fascinating and colorful characters that if fleshed out as the reader might wish, it would result in a multi-volume encyclopedia rather than the fast paced intellectual excitement it is. Nevertheless, even as presented in textured vignettes, the richness and variety of personalities that people this history in the making is awesome. Those already familiar with the usual suspects (Jung, Adler, Freud father and daughter, etc.) will be delighted to add to their knowledge Karl Kraus and Krafft-Ebing, Bleuler and Brill, Reik and Reich, and many dozens more. The notion that psychoanalysis sprang from Sigmund Freud's head alone, that it was some kind of mid-summer's night's dream he concocted which "caught on" for awhile in the century just past, is forever laid to rest in Makari's tour de force. As the author writes, "The culture that had given birth to psychoanalysis had become a graveyard...(but) a man (Freud) has come to represent a history....haunting his sons and daughters, his enemies and his friends."