Freud: From Youthful Dream to Mid-Life Crisis

Newton uses Freud's published correspondence with boyhood friend Eduard Silberstein to show that, by age 19, Freud dreamed of becoming not only a great scientist but a revolutionary healer as well. In this engrossing biography, Newton, a psychology professor at the Wright Institute in California, challenges Jeffrey Masson's accusation, in The Assault on Truth (1985), that political expedience motivated Freud to abandon his seduction theory, according to which neurosis results from the sexual molestation of small children. Drawing on Freud's letters to his mentor, Wilhelm Fliess, Newton compellingly argues that Freud's own clinical case studies scuttled the seduction theory, and that Freud's ensuing despair at his inability to uncover the root cause of neurosis led to his systematic self-analysis and to his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). By treating Freud's life as a series of developmental stages of personal growth, Newton has fashioned an often startling portrait rich in clinical insights. (Mar.)