What do you think?
Rate this book
Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. George Makari
Groundbreaking, insightful, and compulsively readable, "Revolution in Mind" goes beyond myth and polemic to give us the story of one of the most controversial and important intellectual endeavors of the twentieth century. In this masterful history, George Makari demonstrates how a new way of thinking about inner life coalesced and won followers who spread this body of thought throughout the West. Along the way he introduces the reader to a fascinating array of characters, many of whom have been long ignored or forgotten. "Revolution in Mind" is a brilliant, engaging, and radically new work--the first ever to account fully for the making of psychoanalysis.
613 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
69 people are currently reading
595 people want to read
About the author
George Makari
4 books38 followersGeorge Makari is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. The author of the acclaimed history Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis and Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, he lives in New York City.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
July 22, 2022
This is a history of the psychoanalytic movement which traces, arguably, its evolution from being Freudian to becoming a discipline in its own right.
My own study of Freud and of psychoanalysis started in high school with his disappointing 'Civilization and its Discontents', a late work. The rest followed, mostly in college and in seminary, as I happened upon volumes in bookstores or was assigned them for a class. It was confusing, more confusing than need be, because I read everything out of order and because Freud's own views changed often. So, too, I read books by his colleagues and followers, again with no sense of chronology. I wish I'd read this book early on.
My own study of Freud and of psychoanalysis started in high school with his disappointing 'Civilization and its Discontents', a late work. The rest followed, mostly in college and in seminary, as I happened upon volumes in bookstores or was assigned them for a class. It was confusing, more confusing than need be, because I read everything out of order and because Freud's own views changed often. So, too, I read books by his colleagues and followers, again with no sense of chronology. I wish I'd read this book early on.
April 30, 2012
Makari's claim for psychoanalysis is modest and acceptable as far as it goes: he describes it as the best theory of the inner life of the mind offered yet by Western civilization at the time. Whether it has been superseded by new models is a matter for a different book.
Starting with the young Freud's formative years studying the emerging science of the mind in France, Makari clearly sketches the antecendents and context in which this revolution in mind was conceived: a mix of Romanticism, middle-European liberalism, the philosophy of Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and the attempt to divide science into applied and theoretical disciplines.
He also tells a fascinating saga of a brilliant patriarch who creates a tribe of equally brilliant, if often wayward intellectual offspring and deals with them with frequent expulsions and banishments. More than once, Freud comes across as a figure much like the Titan Saturn, a being of great stature and power, but also a jealous parent, devouring his children rather than be overthrown by them.
I have friends who dismiss Freud as 'Herr Fraud' and indeed so many of his basic contentions have been rightly discarded over time. I still can't fathom the phallocentric megalomania that resulted in the theory of penis envy, for instance. But he was one of the modern era's great intellectual pioneers, and Makari clearly outlines how Freud's intellectual doggedness and his gift for synthesis helped him draw together the best from different strands of previous research and thought. Freud was also something of a magpie, leaping from one synthesis to the next each time he found a powerful central idea to organise his thoughts around, but not so effective as a creative theoriser who could offer a completely coherent unified model of his new science.
This quality, combined with an autocratic streak that the old testament deity would have envied helped create a movement that was almost cultish and in which radical new theories resulted in schism rather than a broadening of understanding.
Makari traces the many divides and alliances that characterised this fascinating movement in its heyday, roughly from 1910 to 1940. With the Nazis assuming power and Fascism getting its hour in the sun, the intellectual, social and academic institutions and trends that had nurtured psychoanalysis died. Psychoanalysis lived on, finding new centres in England and the US, but it can be seen as a legacy from an old world, from an old Europe that is no more.
It's a fascinating story, filled with throught-provoking ideas and memorable characters, from Freud himself to his many discarded proteges such as Jung, Adler and Reich. There are farces, triumphs, epic ordeals and bathetic farces contained herein. A fascinating history of the origins and maturation of a theory that has contributed much to science, therapy and art.
It's worth adding that this book is not a literary triumph. While it's reasonably readable, Makari's prose ranges from workmanlike to a bit garbled. He use a lot of Americanisms that feel anachronistic and he hasn't the foggiest notion of how to construct a sentence that is both elegant and communicative, all too often settling for formulations that are neither.
Starting with the young Freud's formative years studying the emerging science of the mind in France, Makari clearly sketches the antecendents and context in which this revolution in mind was conceived: a mix of Romanticism, middle-European liberalism, the philosophy of Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and the attempt to divide science into applied and theoretical disciplines.
He also tells a fascinating saga of a brilliant patriarch who creates a tribe of equally brilliant, if often wayward intellectual offspring and deals with them with frequent expulsions and banishments. More than once, Freud comes across as a figure much like the Titan Saturn, a being of great stature and power, but also a jealous parent, devouring his children rather than be overthrown by them.
I have friends who dismiss Freud as 'Herr Fraud' and indeed so many of his basic contentions have been rightly discarded over time. I still can't fathom the phallocentric megalomania that resulted in the theory of penis envy, for instance. But he was one of the modern era's great intellectual pioneers, and Makari clearly outlines how Freud's intellectual doggedness and his gift for synthesis helped him draw together the best from different strands of previous research and thought. Freud was also something of a magpie, leaping from one synthesis to the next each time he found a powerful central idea to organise his thoughts around, but not so effective as a creative theoriser who could offer a completely coherent unified model of his new science.
This quality, combined with an autocratic streak that the old testament deity would have envied helped create a movement that was almost cultish and in which radical new theories resulted in schism rather than a broadening of understanding.
Makari traces the many divides and alliances that characterised this fascinating movement in its heyday, roughly from 1910 to 1940. With the Nazis assuming power and Fascism getting its hour in the sun, the intellectual, social and academic institutions and trends that had nurtured psychoanalysis died. Psychoanalysis lived on, finding new centres in England and the US, but it can be seen as a legacy from an old world, from an old Europe that is no more.
It's a fascinating story, filled with throught-provoking ideas and memorable characters, from Freud himself to his many discarded proteges such as Jung, Adler and Reich. There are farces, triumphs, epic ordeals and bathetic farces contained herein. A fascinating history of the origins and maturation of a theory that has contributed much to science, therapy and art.
It's worth adding that this book is not a literary triumph. While it's reasonably readable, Makari's prose ranges from workmanlike to a bit garbled. He use a lot of Americanisms that feel anachronistic and he hasn't the foggiest notion of how to construct a sentence that is both elegant and communicative, all too often settling for formulations that are neither.
January 7, 2022
Because I knew almost nothing about Freud and the psychoanalysts, I decided to read George Makari’s history of them, Revolution in Mind.
Summarizing Freud
It’s the latter half of the 19th century, and psychologists want to study the mind scientifically, which would require something other than philosophical meditations or religious ideas of a soul. How would one do that?
They appear to start with people who undeniably have problems that can be tied to the mind—hysterics and neurotics. There were three theories that attempted to explain these mental problems. First, maybe the cause was physical. Second, maybe the cause was a hereditary weakness (this one appears to quickly collapse into racism, especially anti-Semitism). Third, maybe the mind creates its own problems. As evidence mounted for the third cause, the psychologists needed a model of how the mind might work. Freud found a way to explain how both the mind and the body could produce mental problems.
By analyzing dreams, Freud created a model of mental conflict. The unconscious mind has desires that are censored by the conscious mind. That conflict can lead to mental problems that can be unpacked and resolved. If the unconscious mind has desires, why would the conscious mind repress them? This is where Freud’s notorious sex stuff comes in.
Sex offered Freud several advantages. First, even in a sexually conservative culture, it’s not hard to accept that people care a lot about sex. Second, it seems like people in every culture care a lot about sex, so this allowed Freud to make a universal claim about the mind. Third, sex could be tied to Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, which were very in vogue at this time but which also supplied a universal cause.
Freud argued that children have sexual desires (this claim is easier to accept if thought of as a desire for pleasure) that are initially free from judgement. Very soon, however, children begin to see their father as a rival for their mother’s attention; they accept that they cannot overthrow their father and join him rather than being castrated by him. In that moment, the child begins to mature and begins to censor sexual urges. With their adult lovers, mentally healthy people will lead well adjusted lives but others will struggle and suffer a variety of mental problems. Freudians would help patients through analysis, which unpacks how repressed desires have gone astray. These ideas were initially referred to as “psychosexuality,” a word that captures Freud’s emphasis on the libido, but over time the field was rebranded “psychoanalysis,” a word that captures how these Freudians would help their patients.
After the First World War, Freud began to develop, arguably change, his ideas. He proposed a new model of the mind, which consists of the I, the over-I, and the It. It would later be rebranded as the ego, superego, and the id. The id is powerful and it is the source of many deep drives while the superego censors those drives so that people can live in society. It is worth noting that some of the psychoanalysts proposed different drives other than libido. But to be a Freudian psychoanalyst meant embracing the libido before the Great War and it meant embracing the ego model of the mind afterward.
Why would people embrace Freud's ideas?
In hindsight, one irony of Freud’s work is that it came out of a desire to study the mind scientifically, but so many of Freud’s ideas read today like speculation or, more charitably, imaginative reasoning. I see a few reasons why these ideas took off.
First, the Freudians seemed to find Freud’s ideas convincing in part because they felt them work when applied to their own lives. They also saw them work in their patients. I suspect what we’re seeing is the power of analysis—labeling our worries and thinking about where they come from often does feel cathartic or at least creates a path forward. Second, Freud comes across as a great manipulator. He collected and discarded allies like Carl Jung throughout his career, and he was also masterful at creating an in-group that he used to enforce orthodoxy (something that didn’t stop him from defying the orthodoxies he’d created). Third, and Makari seems most sympathetic to this view, Freud’s ideas were embraced by a culture that could put them to use.
At the end of the 19th century, Vienna was very conservative and its cultural norms were determined by the church. (Many readers might find it useful to think of England's Victorian era.) Women were supposed to have no sexual desires and men were supposed to be faithful to their wives. Makari notes that these teachings had led to a flood of prostitution, so what might be more natural? By acknowledging that people have innate sexual desires that, if repressed, lead to mental illness, the church’s positions looked not only wrong but harmful. Further, liberals of this age were longing for something new and secular, and Freud’s ideas offered them longed for answers. For nearly identical reasons, Freud’s ideas were embraced again by the Lost Generation after the First World War. The culture was in an uproar against everything traditional and so it embraced psychoanalysis, which seemed new, focused on sex, and full of exciting ideas. Freud's ideas about how we are always longing for our free childhood are also melancholy in a way that I associate with the Jazz Age. I couldn’t help recalling Fitzgerald’s great Lost Generation novel The Great Gatsby, which ends “so we beat on, boats against the current, drawn back ceaselessly into the past.” What could be more Freudian?
Today, I think we see Freud’s ideas as old fashioned and conservative in a patriarchal sense. But in their time they appear to have been radical and tied to a variety of forms of liberation, including sexual liberation. They were not only embraced by people who longed to be more free within their societies but were also targeted by autocrats. The Nazis would ultimately target and destroy the continental psychoanalytic community, its leaders, and its books. The psychoanalysts fled (or tried to flee) to England the the USA.
Conclusions
Makari's book locates Freud within his time, which may be the best way to understand him today. He concludes:
I disliked how quickly it seemed to become normal to resolve conflict and dispute by appeals to psychoanalysis. When Freud criticizes Jung, he not only criticizes Jung’s ideas but argues that the latter has a complex about his father that he is transferring onto his relationship with Freud. Then again, I often felt like these psychoanalysts’ interpretation of each other was right. It leads to a very messy discourse, and yet...
Reading these scholarly squabbles, I expected to feel disdain. Instead, I found that I could understand how a certain type of person would invest themselves in this labyrinth. In this sense, Freud is maybe well remembered sort of how we remember Nietzsche--a producer of sweeping and radical ideas that are at once outrageous and compelling. Perhaps we should also think of him as a writer of creation stories for modernity.
Summarizing Freud
It’s the latter half of the 19th century, and psychologists want to study the mind scientifically, which would require something other than philosophical meditations or religious ideas of a soul. How would one do that?
They appear to start with people who undeniably have problems that can be tied to the mind—hysterics and neurotics. There were three theories that attempted to explain these mental problems. First, maybe the cause was physical. Second, maybe the cause was a hereditary weakness (this one appears to quickly collapse into racism, especially anti-Semitism). Third, maybe the mind creates its own problems. As evidence mounted for the third cause, the psychologists needed a model of how the mind might work. Freud found a way to explain how both the mind and the body could produce mental problems.
By analyzing dreams, Freud created a model of mental conflict. The unconscious mind has desires that are censored by the conscious mind. That conflict can lead to mental problems that can be unpacked and resolved. If the unconscious mind has desires, why would the conscious mind repress them? This is where Freud’s notorious sex stuff comes in.
Sex offered Freud several advantages. First, even in a sexually conservative culture, it’s not hard to accept that people care a lot about sex. Second, it seems like people in every culture care a lot about sex, so this allowed Freud to make a universal claim about the mind. Third, sex could be tied to Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, which were very in vogue at this time but which also supplied a universal cause.
Freud argued that children have sexual desires (this claim is easier to accept if thought of as a desire for pleasure) that are initially free from judgement. Very soon, however, children begin to see their father as a rival for their mother’s attention; they accept that they cannot overthrow their father and join him rather than being castrated by him. In that moment, the child begins to mature and begins to censor sexual urges. With their adult lovers, mentally healthy people will lead well adjusted lives but others will struggle and suffer a variety of mental problems. Freudians would help patients through analysis, which unpacks how repressed desires have gone astray. These ideas were initially referred to as “psychosexuality,” a word that captures Freud’s emphasis on the libido, but over time the field was rebranded “psychoanalysis,” a word that captures how these Freudians would help their patients.
After the First World War, Freud began to develop, arguably change, his ideas. He proposed a new model of the mind, which consists of the I, the over-I, and the It. It would later be rebranded as the ego, superego, and the id. The id is powerful and it is the source of many deep drives while the superego censors those drives so that people can live in society. It is worth noting that some of the psychoanalysts proposed different drives other than libido. But to be a Freudian psychoanalyst meant embracing the libido before the Great War and it meant embracing the ego model of the mind afterward.
Why would people embrace Freud's ideas?
In hindsight, one irony of Freud’s work is that it came out of a desire to study the mind scientifically, but so many of Freud’s ideas read today like speculation or, more charitably, imaginative reasoning. I see a few reasons why these ideas took off.
First, the Freudians seemed to find Freud’s ideas convincing in part because they felt them work when applied to their own lives. They also saw them work in their patients. I suspect what we’re seeing is the power of analysis—labeling our worries and thinking about where they come from often does feel cathartic or at least creates a path forward. Second, Freud comes across as a great manipulator. He collected and discarded allies like Carl Jung throughout his career, and he was also masterful at creating an in-group that he used to enforce orthodoxy (something that didn’t stop him from defying the orthodoxies he’d created). Third, and Makari seems most sympathetic to this view, Freud’s ideas were embraced by a culture that could put them to use.
At the end of the 19th century, Vienna was very conservative and its cultural norms were determined by the church. (Many readers might find it useful to think of England's Victorian era.) Women were supposed to have no sexual desires and men were supposed to be faithful to their wives. Makari notes that these teachings had led to a flood of prostitution, so what might be more natural? By acknowledging that people have innate sexual desires that, if repressed, lead to mental illness, the church’s positions looked not only wrong but harmful. Further, liberals of this age were longing for something new and secular, and Freud’s ideas offered them longed for answers. For nearly identical reasons, Freud’s ideas were embraced again by the Lost Generation after the First World War. The culture was in an uproar against everything traditional and so it embraced psychoanalysis, which seemed new, focused on sex, and full of exciting ideas. Freud's ideas about how we are always longing for our free childhood are also melancholy in a way that I associate with the Jazz Age. I couldn’t help recalling Fitzgerald’s great Lost Generation novel The Great Gatsby, which ends “so we beat on, boats against the current, drawn back ceaselessly into the past.” What could be more Freudian?
Today, I think we see Freud’s ideas as old fashioned and conservative in a patriarchal sense. But in their time they appear to have been radical and tied to a variety of forms of liberation, including sexual liberation. They were not only embraced by people who longed to be more free within their societies but were also targeted by autocrats. The Nazis would ultimately target and destroy the continental psychoanalytic community, its leaders, and its books. The psychoanalysts fled (or tried to flee) to England the the USA.
Conclusions
Makari's book locates Freud within his time, which may be the best way to understand him today. He concludes:
Psychoanalysis was born in Europe. It was the child of European cultures, nurtured by Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft, post-Kantian philosophy, Neo-Romanticism, and sexual reform. It found inspiration in the creative tensions between Germany and France, and grew up in Europe’s medical institutions and the liberal urban centres that produced a radical modern aesthetic—such as the literary, philosophical, and artistic movements in Paris, Vienna, Zurich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Prague, and Budapest. It was a discipline founded by the brilliant synthetic work of a Viennese physician who named the complex workings of the psyche in German. The world that nourished psychoanalysis had disappeared. 466Freud's ideas seem less hokey in this historical sense. Because they always seemed weird, I am not sure I ever fully realized how radical Freud's ideas were--or how useful they were to people in overturning repressive traditions.
I disliked how quickly it seemed to become normal to resolve conflict and dispute by appeals to psychoanalysis. When Freud criticizes Jung, he not only criticizes Jung’s ideas but argues that the latter has a complex about his father that he is transferring onto his relationship with Freud. Then again, I often felt like these psychoanalysts’ interpretation of each other was right. It leads to a very messy discourse, and yet...
Reading these scholarly squabbles, I expected to feel disdain. Instead, I found that I could understand how a certain type of person would invest themselves in this labyrinth. In this sense, Freud is maybe well remembered sort of how we remember Nietzsche--a producer of sweeping and radical ideas that are at once outrageous and compelling. Perhaps we should also think of him as a writer of creation stories for modernity.
February 11, 2014
I loved this book - it's a great story really well told. It runs to almost 500 pages, but from about the mid-way point I found it hard to put down! The book starts with Freud arriving in Paris and then tells the story of psychoanalysis until just after the second world war. It is not a story of one man's struggle to gain acceptance for a radical theory - it's about Freud synthesising all sorts of ideas in a way that appealed to all sorts of people and triggered all sorts of further thoughts (including new thoughts and new syntheses in Freud himself). Freud offered something that could claim to be a science but could also offer deep insights into the human mind (or soul really although that is a word everyone seemed to studiously avoid), so it is not surprising that a wide range of views emerged and bitter disputes over which views were within the bounds of acceptable debate and which were heretical. The question running through this book is: what defines psychoanalysis? and as Makari shows the answer to that question changed over time. Initially, recognition of the unconscious and (sexual) libido was the touchstone, but later (and particularly after Freud went beyond the pleasure principle) that was less clear. Makari suggests that at the point the emphasis moved from particular theoretical claims to a particular type of practice, but even that is problematic since the rules of the practice (and guidelines for proper technique) only emerged gradually and are themselves open to discussion and disagreement. Anyway, the book covers a lot of ground in a really interesting way with some lovely touches of humour. The judgements seem to me generally pretty reasonable, although of course they do reflect the author's own approach and beliefs (for example, he seems a bit harsh on Melanie Klein). Overall, I would strongly recommend this book to anyone with a serious interest in psychoanalysis.
December 13, 2024
Review written 5/6/2010
The great William Arrowsmith is the only translator of Nietzsche into English who undertook to render the closing section of the first of the four Untimely Meditations, in which Nietzsche offered a large sampling of the infelicities (often amounting to what we call "howlers") in the writing style of one "David Strauss, the Writer and Confessor."
Here is a similar bestiary of what Harper Collins overlooked in this justly celebrated book by George Makari. Please forgive a grammarian crank his remarks, motivated as they are by care for the English language, for the profession, and for the reading community. Revolution in Mind is an illuminating narrative of the origins of psychoanalysis. My admiration of its insightful handling of the ideas is tempered by my concern with matters of English grammar and rhetoric that most people regard as trivial.
p.263. Makari makes some good use of the famous remark by Ferenczi, "In times of war, the Muses are silent." He meant that the nascent psychoanalytic community would have to temper the theoretical creativity of its more intellectually independent members until the discipline matured, otherwise such creativity might exacerbate the factionalism that threatened to destroy psychoanalysis as a viable branch of medicine. Fine. But then we get these lines: "Members who wished to rewrite 'our Science' had to be silenced. This Nuremberg directive had Adler's name on it, but he showed little interest in modifying his views or deferring to these concerns. In the end, he was the Muse that needed to be silenced." So Adler was a Muse? Adler was nobody's Muse, and even if he was, that's not what Makari is trying to say. He means that Adler was the PERSON who had to be silenced, but he goes for the repetition as if this did not matter. Also, "to be silenced" was absolutely not what Adler "needed." This is a street idiom, where the needs of the aggressor are stated as the victim's needs--as when a thug says "you need to give me your money." No, you need my money; what I need is a cop.
p.266. "Freud publicly touted his tolerance of diverse opinion, as exemplified by his barely contained capacity to endure Wilhelm Stekel..." What Freud "barely contained" was his contempt for Stekel, not his capacity to endure Stekel. Was his capacity going to escape?
p.267. "When Freud announced Stekel's departure to the Vienna Society..." We can work out from the context that "to" governs "announced" and not "departure," but prose need not burden the reader with ear-snagging ambiguities like this one.
p.268. Along these lines, read the last complete paragraph on page 268 and watch yourself backpedaling to be sure of just who is "he" and who is "the older man."
p.269. "The long paper did not appear to be a rebel's yell, for it opened by paying homage to Sigmund Freud's dream book and took as a given that that hero of classic Greek drama, Oedipus Rex, was living inside us all." The phrase "rebel yell" comes from the American Civil War and is out of place here. If accidental rhyme in prose is to be avoided, "book and took" is not good; neither is "that that." The literature of the Fifth Century BCE is called "Classical," not "classic." The name of the figure in question, like the drama which bears his name, is simply Oedipus, not Oedipus Rex (which is both Latin and extraneous).
p.270. "Like Helly Preiswerk, Frank Miller was an adept, a woman who made the unconscious manifest." I may have missed something in previous pages (I did go back and look again), or I may be the only educated person who hasn't heard of Helly Preiswerk, but who was she?
p.271. Summarizing Jung's interpretation of the fantasies of his patient Frank Miller, Makari writes: "Her psychological struggle with the 'Father Imago'...provoked unconscious religious fantasies that traced the historical movement from the moral decadence of Roman times to the founding of Christianity and Mithraism." The incoherence of this passage is perhaps more Jung's responsibility than Makari's, but a different sort of writer might direct the reader's attention to the problem instead of merely repeating it. Is it Jung or Makari who writes of "the moral decadence of Roman times"? Decadence is a decline; exactly what morally superior past is supposed to have preceded this decline? Are "Roman times" the decadent times? Surely the early Republic with its citizen-farmer-soldiers was not a decadent society, and surely "Roman Times" include "the founding of Christianity and Mithraism," since those gradual events preceded the fall of the Western Roman Empire by several centuries. If "moral decadence" refers to the reign of Nero, there's a chronology problem, since that emperor allegedly illuminated his rooms with the burning bodies of Christians; they were already around during his reign, so its "decadence" cannot have resulted in "the founding of Christianity."
p.273. "Freud then added innocently that his own thought moved forward when he felt 'compelled to by the pressure of facts or by the influence of someone else's ideas.'" His thought moved forward when he felt compelled to--to what? To move forward, in the kitchen?
p.274. "Again, Auguste Comte's curse rose." Specters rise; curses do not.
p.283. "Jones had not mentioned anything about secrecy, but Freud emphasized it: 'this committee had to be strictly secret in his existence and in his actions.'" Again one can't tell whether the error lies with Freud, or Jones, or Makari; obviously we want a third person singular possessive pronoun which was probably his/its in German and has unfortunately been rendered (by whom?) "his" instead of "its" in English. If the error predates Makari, he should have inserted [sic:]; if not, he or his editor should have fixed it.
p.286. "But Jones also expressed reservations." Nope. Jones, too, expressed reservations. You want to add Jones to the list of people with reservations, not add reservations to the list of what Jones had.
p.290. "But some core propositions--especially the defining of the unconscious--were very difficult to prove." The defining was difficult to prove? The defining was a proposition? This is just incoherent.
p.298. "The Viennese philosopher Ernst Mach..." Mach was a physicist, one of the most important figures in the history of that discipline. Makari calls him a philosopher because Makari is only interested in the small part of Mach's work that fits neatly into philosophy (so it can be more easily related to psychology), and apparently has not heard of the rest.
p.298. "Mach argued for description only in science, and he viewed synthetic explanations as unwarranted." The word Makari needed was "speculative," not "synthetic." For a neo-Kantian like Mach, "synthetic" propositions are already part of our a priori knowledge of the world by virtue of our inborn epistemic equipment; we cannot elide them without landing in what James called "a blooming, buzzing confusion." Without synthesis there can be no description, let alone theory.
p.324. "Food was scarce, funds unavailable, and the capacity for communication outside Hungary difficult." Nothing like a difficult capacity, eh?
p.326. "Jones had little interest in laymen, but Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs took the Brunswick Square applicants and expressed the wish that by bringing these people into the fold..." He took them? Where?
p.328. "The establishment of such guidelines was of TANTAMOUNT IMPORTANCE..." People make this sort of mistake because they have neither read enough books in English to absorb the idioms of the language by rote, nor learned enough about language in general to know that "tant" is a correlative pronoun that means "so much, as much as." Paramount importance, not tantamount.
p.339. "He digested the standard cafe fare: Weininger, Schopenhauer, and Kant..." Not in that order, I hope.
p.344. "Therefore, conflicts...were entirely out of conscious, which meant..." Conscious is an adjective. We speak of "the unconscious," but I've never seen "conscious" used as a noun--certainly not without an article.
p.374. "Like prewar Berlin itself, Abraham gave little hint of originality in his early writings." I can't imagine what that means. ibid. "In this regard, Abraham shared Ferenczi and Rank's belief that more attention be paid to the analytic situation." Trainwreck.
p.377. "...modes for interaction" This should be "modes OF interaction."
p.393-4. "For the close reader, Sterba had let the Technical Seminar's rabbit out of the bag." That's "cat out of the bag," not "rabbit out of the hat" and certainly not "rabbit out of the bag."
p.401. "Much of these discussions occurred at..." Should be "many," not "much."
p.417. "The victory of the Nazis and the Aryanization of the Berlin Institute was a catastrophe not just for Germany. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, it also announced a grave, immediate threat to Europe and more immediately, Austria." I am not calling anybody an anti-Semite, but in a book about Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis this passage just stinks. It's like writing a book about the origins of Blues music and saying the slave trade was a disaster not just for the shipbuilders whose galleys were often wrecked on the ocean, but also for the investors in those shipping companies. Not very sensitive.
p.428. "This conclusion encouraged Klein's move from the complexities of inner and outer to just the inner." Writer and editor are sleeping peacefully.
p.437. "...who Anna introduced.." WHOM she introduced.
p.438. "After the rise of the Nazis, many German analysts came to Vienna to participate in the stimulating analytic scene, despite the risk that Hitler's shadow loomed over Austria." I see no way to construe this that does not involve a mistake. "Loom" is not a transitive verb. Also, risk + shadow + loom = redundancy.
p.453. "...continuum between biology, psychology, and sociology." The preposition "between" is used for two elements; AMONG is used for three or more.
p.454. "...moral and ethical self-reflection.." What, for the writer of those words, is the difference? If there is none, or if you haven't the space to specify it, then choose one term and drop the other. As it is, you're blowing smoke.
p.465. "In 1938, 30 percent of the I.P.A. membership lived in America, and that percentage was about to grow exponentially." That's a howler. What is the smallest exponent? 30 to the zero power is one, so he can't mean that. 30 to the one is 30, which is no growth at all. But then 30 squared is 900. That means that out of every 100 (per-cent, remember?) psychoanalysts, 900 of them live in America. Or if he means 30% times 30%, then the number is getting smaller, not growing.
p.466. "On the first day of September 1939, Adolph Hitler invaded Poland." That's the worst way to put it. The Wehrmacht invaded Poland; millions of enthusiastic racist Nazis from Germany and Austria invaded Poland under orders from Hitler, the mentally ill puppet of military industrialists and financiers like Krupp, Thyssen, and Bayer.
p.471. "A series of ten discussions took place between January 27, 1943, to May 3, 1944." FROM x TO y, or BETWEEN x AND y, but not BETWEEN x TO y. I haven't cited any of the merely typographical errors which plague this celebrated book.
The great William Arrowsmith is the only translator of Nietzsche into English who undertook to render the closing section of the first of the four Untimely Meditations, in which Nietzsche offered a large sampling of the infelicities (often amounting to what we call "howlers") in the writing style of one "David Strauss, the Writer and Confessor."
Here is a similar bestiary of what Harper Collins overlooked in this justly celebrated book by George Makari. Please forgive a grammarian crank his remarks, motivated as they are by care for the English language, for the profession, and for the reading community. Revolution in Mind is an illuminating narrative of the origins of psychoanalysis. My admiration of its insightful handling of the ideas is tempered by my concern with matters of English grammar and rhetoric that most people regard as trivial.
p.263. Makari makes some good use of the famous remark by Ferenczi, "In times of war, the Muses are silent." He meant that the nascent psychoanalytic community would have to temper the theoretical creativity of its more intellectually independent members until the discipline matured, otherwise such creativity might exacerbate the factionalism that threatened to destroy psychoanalysis as a viable branch of medicine. Fine. But then we get these lines: "Members who wished to rewrite 'our Science' had to be silenced. This Nuremberg directive had Adler's name on it, but he showed little interest in modifying his views or deferring to these concerns. In the end, he was the Muse that needed to be silenced." So Adler was a Muse? Adler was nobody's Muse, and even if he was, that's not what Makari is trying to say. He means that Adler was the PERSON who had to be silenced, but he goes for the repetition as if this did not matter. Also, "to be silenced" was absolutely not what Adler "needed." This is a street idiom, where the needs of the aggressor are stated as the victim's needs--as when a thug says "you need to give me your money." No, you need my money; what I need is a cop.
p.266. "Freud publicly touted his tolerance of diverse opinion, as exemplified by his barely contained capacity to endure Wilhelm Stekel..." What Freud "barely contained" was his contempt for Stekel, not his capacity to endure Stekel. Was his capacity going to escape?
p.267. "When Freud announced Stekel's departure to the Vienna Society..." We can work out from the context that "to" governs "announced" and not "departure," but prose need not burden the reader with ear-snagging ambiguities like this one.
p.268. Along these lines, read the last complete paragraph on page 268 and watch yourself backpedaling to be sure of just who is "he" and who is "the older man."
p.269. "The long paper did not appear to be a rebel's yell, for it opened by paying homage to Sigmund Freud's dream book and took as a given that that hero of classic Greek drama, Oedipus Rex, was living inside us all." The phrase "rebel yell" comes from the American Civil War and is out of place here. If accidental rhyme in prose is to be avoided, "book and took" is not good; neither is "that that." The literature of the Fifth Century BCE is called "Classical," not "classic." The name of the figure in question, like the drama which bears his name, is simply Oedipus, not Oedipus Rex (which is both Latin and extraneous).
p.270. "Like Helly Preiswerk, Frank Miller was an adept, a woman who made the unconscious manifest." I may have missed something in previous pages (I did go back and look again), or I may be the only educated person who hasn't heard of Helly Preiswerk, but who was she?
p.271. Summarizing Jung's interpretation of the fantasies of his patient Frank Miller, Makari writes: "Her psychological struggle with the 'Father Imago'...provoked unconscious religious fantasies that traced the historical movement from the moral decadence of Roman times to the founding of Christianity and Mithraism." The incoherence of this passage is perhaps more Jung's responsibility than Makari's, but a different sort of writer might direct the reader's attention to the problem instead of merely repeating it. Is it Jung or Makari who writes of "the moral decadence of Roman times"? Decadence is a decline; exactly what morally superior past is supposed to have preceded this decline? Are "Roman times" the decadent times? Surely the early Republic with its citizen-farmer-soldiers was not a decadent society, and surely "Roman Times" include "the founding of Christianity and Mithraism," since those gradual events preceded the fall of the Western Roman Empire by several centuries. If "moral decadence" refers to the reign of Nero, there's a chronology problem, since that emperor allegedly illuminated his rooms with the burning bodies of Christians; they were already around during his reign, so its "decadence" cannot have resulted in "the founding of Christianity."
p.273. "Freud then added innocently that his own thought moved forward when he felt 'compelled to by the pressure of facts or by the influence of someone else's ideas.'" His thought moved forward when he felt compelled to--to what? To move forward, in the kitchen?
p.274. "Again, Auguste Comte's curse rose." Specters rise; curses do not.
p.283. "Jones had not mentioned anything about secrecy, but Freud emphasized it: 'this committee had to be strictly secret in his existence and in his actions.'" Again one can't tell whether the error lies with Freud, or Jones, or Makari; obviously we want a third person singular possessive pronoun which was probably his/its in German and has unfortunately been rendered (by whom?) "his" instead of "its" in English. If the error predates Makari, he should have inserted [sic:]; if not, he or his editor should have fixed it.
p.286. "But Jones also expressed reservations." Nope. Jones, too, expressed reservations. You want to add Jones to the list of people with reservations, not add reservations to the list of what Jones had.
p.290. "But some core propositions--especially the defining of the unconscious--were very difficult to prove." The defining was difficult to prove? The defining was a proposition? This is just incoherent.
p.298. "The Viennese philosopher Ernst Mach..." Mach was a physicist, one of the most important figures in the history of that discipline. Makari calls him a philosopher because Makari is only interested in the small part of Mach's work that fits neatly into philosophy (so it can be more easily related to psychology), and apparently has not heard of the rest.
p.298. "Mach argued for description only in science, and he viewed synthetic explanations as unwarranted." The word Makari needed was "speculative," not "synthetic." For a neo-Kantian like Mach, "synthetic" propositions are already part of our a priori knowledge of the world by virtue of our inborn epistemic equipment; we cannot elide them without landing in what James called "a blooming, buzzing confusion." Without synthesis there can be no description, let alone theory.
p.324. "Food was scarce, funds unavailable, and the capacity for communication outside Hungary difficult." Nothing like a difficult capacity, eh?
p.326. "Jones had little interest in laymen, but Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs took the Brunswick Square applicants and expressed the wish that by bringing these people into the fold..." He took them? Where?
p.328. "The establishment of such guidelines was of TANTAMOUNT IMPORTANCE..." People make this sort of mistake because they have neither read enough books in English to absorb the idioms of the language by rote, nor learned enough about language in general to know that "tant" is a correlative pronoun that means "so much, as much as." Paramount importance, not tantamount.
p.339. "He digested the standard cafe fare: Weininger, Schopenhauer, and Kant..." Not in that order, I hope.
p.344. "Therefore, conflicts...were entirely out of conscious, which meant..." Conscious is an adjective. We speak of "the unconscious," but I've never seen "conscious" used as a noun--certainly not without an article.
p.374. "Like prewar Berlin itself, Abraham gave little hint of originality in his early writings." I can't imagine what that means. ibid. "In this regard, Abraham shared Ferenczi and Rank's belief that more attention be paid to the analytic situation." Trainwreck.
p.377. "...modes for interaction" This should be "modes OF interaction."
p.393-4. "For the close reader, Sterba had let the Technical Seminar's rabbit out of the bag." That's "cat out of the bag," not "rabbit out of the hat" and certainly not "rabbit out of the bag."
p.401. "Much of these discussions occurred at..." Should be "many," not "much."
p.417. "The victory of the Nazis and the Aryanization of the Berlin Institute was a catastrophe not just for Germany. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, it also announced a grave, immediate threat to Europe and more immediately, Austria." I am not calling anybody an anti-Semite, but in a book about Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis this passage just stinks. It's like writing a book about the origins of Blues music and saying the slave trade was a disaster not just for the shipbuilders whose galleys were often wrecked on the ocean, but also for the investors in those shipping companies. Not very sensitive.
p.428. "This conclusion encouraged Klein's move from the complexities of inner and outer to just the inner." Writer and editor are sleeping peacefully.
p.437. "...who Anna introduced.." WHOM she introduced.
p.438. "After the rise of the Nazis, many German analysts came to Vienna to participate in the stimulating analytic scene, despite the risk that Hitler's shadow loomed over Austria." I see no way to construe this that does not involve a mistake. "Loom" is not a transitive verb. Also, risk + shadow + loom = redundancy.
p.453. "...continuum between biology, psychology, and sociology." The preposition "between" is used for two elements; AMONG is used for three or more.
p.454. "...moral and ethical self-reflection.." What, for the writer of those words, is the difference? If there is none, or if you haven't the space to specify it, then choose one term and drop the other. As it is, you're blowing smoke.
p.465. "In 1938, 30 percent of the I.P.A. membership lived in America, and that percentage was about to grow exponentially." That's a howler. What is the smallest exponent? 30 to the zero power is one, so he can't mean that. 30 to the one is 30, which is no growth at all. But then 30 squared is 900. That means that out of every 100 (per-cent, remember?) psychoanalysts, 900 of them live in America. Or if he means 30% times 30%, then the number is getting smaller, not growing.
p.466. "On the first day of September 1939, Adolph Hitler invaded Poland." That's the worst way to put it. The Wehrmacht invaded Poland; millions of enthusiastic racist Nazis from Germany and Austria invaded Poland under orders from Hitler, the mentally ill puppet of military industrialists and financiers like Krupp, Thyssen, and Bayer.
p.471. "A series of ten discussions took place between January 27, 1943, to May 3, 1944." FROM x TO y, or BETWEEN x AND y, but not BETWEEN x TO y. I haven't cited any of the merely typographical errors which plague this celebrated book.
July 15, 2025
Makari makes psychoanalysis seem less silly by relating it to contemporary science, philosophy, sexology. He also, perhaps unwittingly, suggests just how unscientific it is.
October 15, 2016
Excellent review of the History of Psychoanalysis - goes beyond Freud. With pleaseure, I will have to read this book over and over again due to the wealth of information and characters...fascinating.
Read
October 14, 2013In all honesty, I will not retain much detail from this book. There are so many historical characters, each with their own theories, that I found it impossible to integrate any of these into my existing knowledge about psychoanalysis. However, one thing I will retain (which perhaps was the one thing we are supposed to learn from this book) is that psychoanalysis and all of its theorists were never a solidified whole. There were always schisms from the beginning and even Freud himself took bits and pieces from others while discarding other lesser useful aspects of their theories and then in turn discarding (or at least placing less emphasis on) those aspects while adopting others. There were never any universal truths and it was a very messy game. This book does place Freud into perspective and gives him a solid place in history for me, whereas before he was just a name floating about without any clear linkage to actual events or ideas. I can't say I enjoyed reading this. It was definitely work to get through it. However I can say that I now have a clearer perspective of these ideas in the context of history and that is worth the work to me, although I can't say if it would be so for anyone else.
January 5, 2018
This book is obviously meticulously researched, and I learned a good amount about how the big names in psychoanalysis developed their theories and relate to each other. But it's also incredibly dense and occasionally unnecessarily wordy/repetitive. As a former editor, I couldn't help but think it needed a better or more aggressive editor in some places.
January 4, 2025
Frustrating read, if only because Makari has clearly marshaled a ton of history and epistolary documentation here, only to be too gun-shy about editing it down.
What you get is an often-interesting and thorough study how psychoanalysis developed and was driven by internecine battles—first among Viennese acolytes, and later internationally between communities.
But Makari loves to list off names, regardless of whether their importance pans out or now. So you end up facing a fusillade of information, with the occasional strand carried forward.
Maybe this is an attempt to be balanced among the warring strains of psychoanalytic thought, but a bolder editing pass would have produced a stronger, clearer book at half the length. Alas.
What you get is an often-interesting and thorough study how psychoanalysis developed and was driven by internecine battles—first among Viennese acolytes, and later internationally between communities.
But Makari loves to list off names, regardless of whether their importance pans out or now. So you end up facing a fusillade of information, with the occasional strand carried forward.
Maybe this is an attempt to be balanced among the warring strains of psychoanalytic thought, but a bolder editing pass would have produced a stronger, clearer book at half the length. Alas.
February 18, 2022
Probably the best account of the early movement.
November 1, 2023
This was very good and well-written, if not a little dense 😁
November 21, 2025
Absolute Gold 🪙😁
October 19, 2013
To quote a wonderfully often used phrase, what a long strange trip it's been, with regards to the psychoanalytic movement in the world. This book, a very important must read for any analytic student, regardless of ideology or school of thought, has tasty, frustrating and deep moments that at times never seem to end. Helpful in its tracking of history, it often places the reader in a state of uncertainty. Not unlike the experience of analytic training. Mr. Makari does a more than admirable job of tackling an enormous topic. Hope to see a volume 2, picking up the later half of 20th century.
April 7, 2010
The book went downhill a bit after the prologue/preface, but it was an engaging history of psychoanalysis. I felt a bit like I was in Martha Hadley's theory class at Smith again. I loved the details and history of the lesser known psychoanalysts that informed Freud's theories. It's definitely fascinating how much has been attributed to Freud. I had fun imagining psychoanalytic followers being asked to choose between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud or be placed in an Other group. Anyway, I definitely recommend it.
October 27, 2016
Of interest to psychoanalysts and those who are interested in the field. Part I was a bit dry, but Part II picked up. Fascinating history of the many personalities and historical context within which psychoanalysis developed.
October 1, 2008
This is a good book on the history of psychoanalysis. It gives interesting historical facts about Sigmund Freud,Carl Jung, Alfred Adler. I also found Wilhelm Reich an interesting character.
March 26, 2009
very informative. a good read.
April 17, 2014
Fascinating book about the history of psychoanalysis. All the personal travails of Freud and others that went into creating the science? of psychology. Couldn't put it down.
April 28, 2014
Good book, very densely written. The level of detail to absorb is staggering for a first read. It took me forever to finish but was worth the effort -- I'll probably read it again some day soon.
August 11, 2016
A fascinating and perhaps too densely written study that conveys the origins and intrigues of the movement around Freud until shortly after his death.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews