Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061346624 ISBN 13: 9780061346620

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2008

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.

About the Author:

George Makari is director of Cornell's Institute for the History of Psychiatry, associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College, adjunct associate professor at Rockefeller University, and a faculty member of Columbia University's Psychoanalytic Center. His writings on the history of psychoanalysis have won numerous awards. He lives in New York City

From Publishers Weekly:

Makari, the director of Cornell's Institute for the History of Psychiatry, provides a comprehensive early history of psychoanalysis from 1895 to 1946. Although his early colleague Josef Breuer justifiably claimed that Freud was a man given to absolute and exclusive formulations, the great Viennese thinker's revolutionary understanding of the psyche evolved quite a bit, shifting away from psychosexual theory toward the tripartite division of the psyche (ego/id/superego) around 1920. Discussing the steadily growing community of psychoanalysts in Vienna (and, successively, in Zurich, Berlin and elsewhere), Makari notes that the Freudians could sometimes be intellectually insular and sectlike, resulting in the expulsion of Alfred Adler and C.G. Jung from Freud's circle between 1907 and 1913. Makari succinctly describes developments after Freud's influence peaked, especially the prominence of what came to be called ego psychology as developed by Heinz Hartmann, and the bitter intellectual dispute between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. Makari tries to cover so much ground that some sections get a bit sketchy, but most of his ideas come across clearly in this challenging but rewarding intellectual history. 31 b&w photos. (Jan. 8)
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