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Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis

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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."

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 credential is a thing of the past, but the underlying question of "Why credentials?" remains. One must pause at the question of credentials for a psychoanalyst. Imagine Socrates getting a license to ask, in the Agora, "What is the Good Life?" Imagine Diogenes the Cynica, sleeping naked under the tub, getting a license to go about the world with his lantern, in search of an honest man.

Can "Revolution in Mind" (note that the title has different meanings depending on where one puts the emphasis), which not only is a fait accompli by Freud and others, but also is the subject of their discovery of the ever-flowing river -- Heraclitus said, "You can't step into the same river twice" -- of the psyche, a river partly running underground, be reconciled with orothodoxy? Can revolution (ask a Marxist) be reconciled with the need to comply with norms set forth by the heirarchy of an institution (in one of its protean personifications)? Unless the answer is "Yes," there can be no Psychoanalysis; and unless the answer is "No," there can be no Psychoanalysis. (The same might be said of religion.)

Interspersed among the details and helpful connections made ever so deftly (with hardly ever any sign of judgmental intervention by the historian [who, at best, can only hope to tell a "likely story," according to H. G. Wells] are wonderful photographs and a few gems like this one: --

"Altenberg sought to cast off conventional ethics and return to a natural primitivity; toward this goal he advocated a panoply of health measures aimed at a liberation from clothing, especially women's undergarments. His motto was, 'One cannot wear too little.' One Winter he caught pneumonia and died. p. 141

Makari is respectful of the inexorable forces creating institutional limits, similar to the "character armor" W. Reich explained as the essential psychic skin, but he is not above an occasional tongue-in-cheek observation, as when, in his Epilogue, he describes the travails of the reorganization of the more-or-less organized Psychoanalysis in New York City, in the 1940s, after the city's recept of hordes of distinguished emigre analysts who had fled Nazi Europe: --

"The New York group also tried to pass an amendment that banned any seccessions without prior approval from the association, an amendment that seemed to misunderstand the nature of a secession." p. 482

In his Acknowledgements, Dr. Makari refers to those who "kept my mountain of work [in preparing his materials] from crushing me." Except for that remark, the reader is allowed comfortably to think that the author must have been there, seen and heard all the events he describes, and knew personally all the people whose many zig-zag moves and manners make up the story. He tells his very long and complex story with the disarming ease characteristic of great story-tellers.

Louis H. Hamel, Jr., Esq.

I waffled between rating this book (I read the kindle edition) 4 or 5 stars. It's obviously for those in the field or historians of the field of psychoanalysis as Markarki really bounces around to a large number of ajoining fields that helped shape psychoanalysis into what it became in the earlier years. If you're not super interested in psychoanalysis I really wouldn't even start this behemoth. At times that gets to be a bit tiresome, but in the end I felt like it really did add in an original way to my overall understanding of the birth of our field.

I do not read all that many books on psychology. I have interest in many of the major figures associated with Psychoanalysis, but I usually mostly default to the line that because Psychoanalysis predicts nothing it is impossible to know what it really says about anything.

To his credit Makari does nothing to dispell these ideas. He writes with dispassionate clarity, and at times urgency, when he describes the many, many personalities and ideas that built psychoanalysis into an ever changing inchoate mass that remained anchored in a broad psychosexual base. Freud was the touchstone, but he was neither the "inventor" who built the theories, and, as it turned out, less the controller on its various permutations.

From the pre-psychosexual days Freud with his work in France looked at hysterics and was exposed to a variety of theories -- from the idea that all mental illness is degenerative, to that which saw it as a fundemental inability to "balance" vital forces. Freud, changed his idea over many decades but his courage to lead into new territory with the help of other academics was key to the eventual coalescence of new psychosexual ideas (some that he eventually came to regard as rather absurd in later life).


Conflating, combining, and changing ideas such as psycho-sexuality, bio-physics, physical-psychology, and hypnotism, among many others, he with the benefit of his Wednesday group meetings cultivated a small group of like-minded people. Expanding from Vienna, Freud got the clinical respect he needed in Zurich when his ideas began to be used to treat patients. As Psychoanalysis grew and spread it broke with the old master into countless forms: Adler stressing agression and Jung not content with the limited explanations of the psychosexual unconscious, Rank, Reich, Reik, Horney and many, many others.

Makari writes well and holds the attention of the reader, especially when the fireworks start over who has a more "valid" theory. The resort of ad hominen arguments by everyone... including Freud is at times shocking. Almost everyone ends up in dispute with somone else over doctrinal issues, and the common slur is, surprise, surprise, that the contending psychoanalyst has either a neurosis, or has not been properly psychoanalysed. At times it astounding funny that people of this intellectual stature would resort to such base backbiting. But Makari uses such doctrinal clashes to vivify the narrative, and I found them reveting. I found his discription of Reich (someone whom I regarded as a bit of decrepit rake), to be very sympathetic and challenged my ideas on him a little.

Although the work is well sourced, it lacks a discrete bibliography. This would be very helpful for people like me who would like to know where they can continue this most interesting journey.

This is a beautiful book on the origins of psychoanalyis up to WWII. If you want to understand what Freud was all about read it. It is deep, broad, non-partisan, very informative. A fundamental, must read. I just finished reading it, and I am eager to read it again. Much better than any of the standard biographies. Makari did an excelent job here, and we only hope he will follow the story up to recent days. Fundamental!

Makari's is certainly an informed and thorough history of psychoanalysis. The founding father of the discipline with his first disciples are depicted with an impressive series of details obtained from an extensive perusal of their public and private writings, documented by numerous excerpts of their correspondence.
However, the analysis in itself is not impressive and almost completely uncritical. Makari is happier with anecdotes than with theories, and writes a book that overlooks some crucial points of the debate he wants to describe. Let me give just one example.
There is no question that Freud pretended to base his theory on biology (the reader may read the authoritative studies of MacMillan and Cioffi on this point). Besides guaranteing the scientific status of psychoanalysis, Freud's obsolete and distorted biological premises had the essential function of justifying his clinical interpretations: dreams, lapsuses, neurotica and psychotic symptoms are psychical actions, that require psychical energy (libido) that derives from body needs. Thus if the patient dreams, the psychoanalyst is entitled to interpret his dream as due to libido, by exclusion: there cannot be any other appropriate source of psychical energy. The psychoanalists who maintained Freud's biological premises looked completely obsolete to their colleagues who wanted to reformulate or to dispose of these premises; but the former could rightly accuse the latter of jeopardizing the epistemology of the analytical method. This crucial debate is reduced in Makari's analysis to skirmishes of different opinions: thus in this book we learn more about Federn's acidic and M. Klein's volcanic temperament, than about their (unsound) reasons.

This is a competent narrative of the origins of psychoanalysis. Full disclosure: my judgment of this book is clouded by two personal factors: my own resentful envy of the prestigiously prestigious prestige with which the book is saturated (see flap copy), and my own scholarly obsession with issues of English grammar and rhetoric that most people (even some writers and editors) regard as trivial. The two combine in the thought that if a less prestigious author were to make this many mistakes of this kind, the book would be trashed in the press or completely ignored. I don't want to ruin anybody's day, but from my perspective the main underperformer here is the "wonderful editor" named explicitly on page 488.

The great William Arrowsmith is the only translator of Nietzsche into English who bothered 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 "David Strauss, the Writer and Confessor." Here is a similar bestiary of what Harper Collins allowed out of the house in this book by George Makari.

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.264. "Freud had tolerated Stekel, even admired his uncanny critical acumen, but was contemptuous of his theorizing." This is the first we've heard of Stekel's "uncanny critical acumen" or Freud's admiration of it. There's no footnote. Surely such a strong formulation demands at least one example?

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 good prose does not burden the reader with ear-snagging ambiguities like this one; the author is supposed to resolve them, so that the reader doesn't have to slow down and do it himself. This book has all too many grammatical ambiguities of this sort.

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 the hell 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 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 errors I have cited above are the sort that students make--intelligent students who are simply too young and inexperienced to have read the thousand books you've got to read in order to accumulate so much mental exposure to good writing that you stop making these errors. But this book--which has its merits, and even a few passages of grace and beauty--bears four flatulently adoring blurbs from Harold Bloom, Paul Auster, Jonathan Lear, and Murray Gell-Mann. Heck, let's throw in the freaking Nobel Prize while we're at it, shall we? Somebody pick up the phone and call Stockholm...

Meanwhile, can I have my $32.50 back?

Psychoanalysis, like the religious movement of Plymouth Brethren, not to mention the politics of International Trotskyism, is a movement of schisms. "Orthodox Freudianism," Reichism, Reikism (don't confuse these !), Horneyism, Jungism ... but I begin to bore you, right ? This book tells us a lot about these schisms, a little about Freud, and very little about the intellectual history of modern psychology. So yes, it's a useful reference book, especially for those who care about, well, the difference between Reich and Reik.

So far so good. But there is also a certain sloppiness about the production of this book that I for one found annoying. There is no bibliography, although the notes carry bibliographic information. The photos would be so much more enjoyable if they had been printed on separate glossy pages, which is the norm for quality books. The English language is not always quite given its due: does the author know, for example, what the singular is of "phenomena" (p. 416) ? And then we are told, quite a bit, about "Aryan" psychoanalysts (pp. 410, 417, etc). What are Aryans ? I thought that only Nazis think that there are such people.

Yes, research libraries need to buy this book. But not anyone else.