Psychology and Psychiatry
Book Details

Revolution in Mind

The Creation of Psychoanalysis

George Makari

An award-winning scholar delivers a definitive, radically new history of Freud, his disciples, and the tumultuous history of psychoanalysis.

Opinion

‘As I was reading Makari's tome, my dreams seemed all the more vivid and compelling than usual.’
The Weekend Australian 29/3/2008

About this Title

‘George Makari has written nothing less than a history of the modern
mind. He has uncovered the philosophical, scientific, and historical
ideas that revolutionized the way we think about our own mental
processes. With an astounding breadth of knowledge and an unprecedented
gift for synthesis, he takes his reader on a European journey that
begins in the late nineteenth century and ends in the cataclysm of the
Second World War. There are many characters in this book-a contentious,
brilliant, motley, flawed, sometimes comic group of human beings-who
together forged the ideas we have inherited. But /Revolution in Mind/
is also a tragedy. It is the moving story of what we lost when the old
world went up in flames.’
-Paul Auster

An award-winning scholar and writer delivers a definitive, radically new history of Freud, his disciples, and the tumultuous history of psychoanalysis. In this brilliant, engaging and accessible work, the first comprehensive history of the subject ever written, renowned psychoanalyst George Makari goes past the heated debates over Freud to tell the fuller story of the origins and development of psychoanalysis in Europe. Beginning with great changes in late nineteenth century science, medicine and philosophy, Makari traces the field's diverse intellectual influences and the fascinating characters who shaped its formation until 1945.

'Amid great ferment, Sigmund Freud emerged as a creative, interdisciplinary thinker who devised a riveting new theory that won followers that included Eugen Bleuler, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler, all of whom soon broke away. Makari reveals how in the wake of these schisms, psychoanalysis remade itself and began to gain wide acceptance in Europe, only to be banished and sent into exile by the rise of fascism. 

'Groundbreaking, insightful and compulsively readable, Revolution in Mind is a fascinating history of one of the most important movements of modern times.' 

About the Author

George Makari is the Director of Cornell University’s Institute for the History of Psychiatry. His groundbreaking research into the history of pyschoanalysis has won him numerous awards. He lives with his family in New York City.

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978-0-522-85480-0