Reviewed by: The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective Neil Hertz Edith Kurzweil. The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective. With a new introduction by the author. Reprint. Psychiatry and Social Psychology Series. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998. xx + 374 pp. $24.95 (paperbound). This cross-cultural survey of psychoanalysis’s first century is somewhere between a sociological analysis of the institution that Freud founded, and a historical account of the development of his theories and clinical practices by his followers, and the assimilation of Freudian thought into the broader cultural life of five Western nations—Austria, Germany, France, England, and the United States. In a brief introduction to this reedition of a book originally published in 1989, Kurzweil apologizes for limiting herself to just those countries, and to analysts who draw their inspiration from Freud, but she need not: as it stands, the book’s scope is ambitious enough. It is clear from the ample bibliography that she has engaged in a prodigious amount of research—both interviews with analysts and historians, and reading in institutional archives, in case studies and technical papers, as well as in the enormous ancillary literature that psychoanalysis has generated. How to organize this mass of material? Kurzweil divides her book into three sections: “Psychoanalysis before 1945” traces the reception of Freud’s theories, the bureaucratization of the presiding organizations, and the diffusion of psychoanalytic thinking into the spheres of culture and politics. “Applications of Psychoanalysis” discusses how specific national contexts inflected the impact of Freudianism on the practice of psychosomatic medicine, and on theories of education, of the psychology of women, and of literature. “Psychoanalysis since 1945” resumes the chronological narrative, elaborating on organizational vicissitudes, on the “cultural unconscious” of each nation, on the proliferation of theories after Freud, and finally on the political contributions of psychoanalysis. Much of this material is intriguing, and much of it was new to this reviewer. I have been more aware of psychoanalysis’s fortunes in America, England, and France than of developments in Austria or Germany, and therefore to learn that this so-called Jewish science actually persisted in wartime Germany, in a Nazi-approved version promoted by Hermann Goering’s cousin, came as something of a surprise. Of greater consequence were Kurzweil’s discussions of the efforts of Alexander Mitscherlich and his colleagues in postwar Germany to deal with their nation’s collective guilt, and of the effects on the practice and prestige of analysis of the Federal Republic’s generous health insurance policies. Other readers will be drawn to other sections—perhaps to the pages on England, where they will find an account of the organizational complexities growing out of the rivalry between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Indeed, Kurzweil is at her best when she can demonstrate the interinvolvement of clinical or conceptual issues with institutional adjustments, as in her discussion of how the object-relations theories of Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg made possible the American reception of Melanie Klein’s and D. W. Winnicott’s theories of child psychology and thus “signaled an impending theoretical shift within the I[nternational] P[sychoanalytic] A[ssociation]” (p. 144). [End Page 732] Kurzweil is less successful at integrating, either conceptually or narratively, all the material she feels obliged to survey. Faced with what she calls a “theoretical bedlam” (p. 282) expressed in strikingly different idioms, she must summarize and condense, constructing explanatory paragraphs out of snippets of quotation and paraphrase. The results are at times confusing: positions originally presented more amply are here occasionally telescoped to the point of unintelligibility, and the reader is left wondering whether Kurzweil is not simply scornful of the whole psychoanalytic enterprise. In fact, that is not the case—she very much admires the Freudians: any felt uncertainty on that score is rather an artifact of her presentation. The book remains, for all that, an informative one. Neil Hertz Johns Hopkins University Copyright © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press