As an undergraduate in the 1980s, I recall my history, literature, and philosophy professors all describing Freud's genius as his ability to synthesize disparate disciplines into one overarching view. Freud was presented as the last of the nineteenth century's “master thinkers,” the grand systemizer who had distilled the insights of science and the humanities into a comprehensive view of the psyche. In the early 1990s, however, this view of Freud came under an aggressive attack led by Frederick Crews and Jeffrey Masson. According to the “Freud Bashers,” Sigmund was a bit of a manipulative scoundrel who consistently strove to justify his “pseudoscience” that ultimately was nothing more than a flight of his imagination. In response, Freudians mounted a concerted defense, defending his key insights of the unconscious, projection, transference, and repression. Nevertheless, even defenders conceded that there were wayward aspects of the Freudian view, including the universality of the oedipal complex, libido theory, and the misogyny of the castration complex. Defenders, however, considered these errors as only the pitfalls of Freud's heroic attempt to establish a new science. They rested their defense on the claim that psychoanalytic insight has come to permeate the way westerners view the world and remains the best window into the inner life of human beings. George Makari, who is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Weil Medical College, provides a powerful and thorough articulation of this defensive tactic.

Makari's strategy is to move beyond the debate of Freud as “genius or fraud,” by focusing in on how Freud developed his ideas, and then describing how others became “Freudians” and spread the Freudian revolution throughout western culture. The book covers the period from 1870–1945 and consists of three sections, “Making Freudian Theory,” “Making the Freudians,” and “Making Psychoanalysis.” There is also an epilogue that reads as an outline for a book on Freudians after the war.

The first section begins with Freud's arrival in Paris in 1885, where he discovered “a whole community of French psychologists and physicians . . . busy tracking inner life by investigating associations and dissociations, the role of heredity, and the light psychopathology might throw on normal mental functioning” (p. 20). Makari's medical training serves him well in this section as he reconstructs the impact of Charcot, Fechner, Ribot, Breur, as well as Kant and Schopenhauer, on Freud's burgeoning model of the mind. He also captures how Freud's synthetic vision of the psyche, initially presented in the Interpretation of Dreams (1899), was achieved by borrowing ideas from others “only to stand against them, in open and often aggressive intellectual combat” (p. 46). Makari also describes how Freud continued this strategy in his confrontation with the sexologists. With the publication of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1906), Freud's libido theory achieves the grand synthesis of French psychopathology, German biophysics and psychophysics, and the science of sexology. This seems to me the best part of this book—and its biggest contribution.

The second section, “Making the Freudians,” focuses on Vienna and the wide variety of figures in Freud's Wednesday Psychological Society, as well as Zurich and the lab at Burghoelzli where Bleuler, Jung, and Abraham became key supporters of Freud. Makari captures the significance of Jung for Freud by describing how his association studies provided “Freud's broader theories of a repressed unconscious quantifiable scientific verification” (p. 195). Ultimately the differences between the Viennese and Zurichers led to the breach between Freud and Jung because “[o]ne group was Jewish, the other Protestant. One group resided in sexually open Vienna, the other in buttoned-down Zurich. One had a foot in biophysics and psychophysics, and the other was committed to the new kind of lab-based study of psychology” (p. 203). But many other early adherents eventually left as well, including Stekel, Ferenczi, and Adler. Makari describes how Freud's unwavering commitment to libido theory and his psycho-sexuality was at the heart of most of these breaches. Freud's stubborn commitment to his theory, in combination with his tendency to psychologize those who didn't see things his way, is also the source of his somewhat ignominious reputation. The book is full of the squabbles between Freud and his acolytes and would be a hilarious read if Makari was more attuned to the tragic comedy. For example, Freud's stormy relationship with the sycophantic Otto Rank is quite comical in hindsight (pp. 361–65).

Part three, “Making Psychoanalysis,” describes how from 1918–1938 “the great flowering of psychoanalysis occurred” (p. 299). Makari describes how Freud continued to develop his theory after the Three Essays with his On Narcissism: An Introduction (1916), which allowed him to incorporate Adlerian elements into his theory, and the more radical innovation of the death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) that was brought on by contemplating the ubiquitous destruction of the Great War. Makari also portrays the innovations in the development of psychoanalysis in the different centers of Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, London, and New York. He suggests that Freud's continued theoretical innovations ultimately led his followers to become “an impressive list of high-flying theoreticians who after genuine innovation became so enamored with their own speculations that they discredited themselves and tumbled back to earth” (p. 438). In this section Makari provides an excellent reconstruction of the advent of child psychology, which was created by the tense debates between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud in London.

This is an impressive and scholarly book and certainly achieves the objective of moving beyond Freud as genius or fraud to uncover his pervasive impact on the way we see the world.