NY Times Book Review: “Revolution in Mind”

NY Times Book Review: “Revolution in Mind”

A new book on Freud that sounds interesting, although the review is somewhat mixed. The author is George Makari, whom I’ve never heard of before, but apparently he’s the director of Cornell University’s Institute for the History of Psychiatry, although I’ve never heard of that either. Anyhow this bit sounded interesting:

In “Revolution in Mind,” Makari argues that we’ve been blinded to the cultural reach of psychoanalysis by the magnitude of Freud’s stature and the magnetic pull or repulsion of his personality and theories. In Makari’s view, much contemporary discussion about the relevance of psychoanalysis is based on a false choice: “Freud as everlasting genius, or Freud as relic and fraud.” To Makari, the director of Cornell University’s Institute for the History of Psychiatry, this dichotomy is artificial. Instead, he argues, we should look to the rich, polyphonous context that gave birth to and was influenced by the analytic enterprise: “the culture of Kant; the assumptions of Geisteswissenschaft and a European classical education,” along with “evolutionary biology, positivism and Newtonian physics.”

Sounds similar to what I’m trying to do with my own thesis on Lacan.