The book entitled Freud Evaluated by Malcolm Macmillan is a product of many years of intensive labor. In his foreword, Frederick Crews states that the glory days of psychoanalysis are long gone and that this book assures that it is time for reason to prevail.
Ernest R. Hilgard, Professor of Psychology Emeritus, Stanford University
Macmillan's book is one that the serious student of Freud, and of his theoretical claims, simply cannot do without. To his intellectual credit, Macmillan has given psychoanalytic apologists a fair, and more than fair, hearing. Commentators of the next century who are interested in understanding why a hundred years after Freud, psychoanalytic theory began undergoing a thorough revision, will use Macmillan's text as a point of departure. An extraordinary work.
John Kerr, author of A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein
Aside from Ernest Jones's and Peter Gay's hagiographies, it is clear that there are three great Freud books in this century: Frank Sulloway's biography, which places Freud clearly as a biologist and a scientist. Adolph Grunbaum's critique, which views Freud from the perspective of the philosophy of science. And Malcolm Macmillan's book, which applies to Freud the standard which he always presented himself as seeking: a scientific psychologist. Macmillan does something absolutely unique and unexpected: he goes to the sources that Freud cited as the basis for his views, and finds that in almost every case Freud misunderstood or misrepresented what was there. It is an unbelievably important book and it will challenge psychoanalysis into the next century.
John F. Kihlstrom, Professor, Department of Psychology, Yale University
Macmillan's monumental book represents the culmination of two decades of research into the origins and validity of Freud's psychoanalytic ideas. In the course of a penetrating critique of Freud's methods and findings, Macmillan demonstrates convincingly just where Freud went wrong. Freud Evaluated provides a brilliant, rich, and indispensable contribution to the scientific appraisal of pscyhoanalysis.
Frank Sulloway, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, MIT
Although there may be a veritable torrent of books on Freud, there are few that can compare with this one in its historical breadth and detail and the comprehensiveness of its critique of Freudian theory... an important achievement... indispensable for any serious student of psychoanalytic theory.
Morris N. Eagle
Contemporary Psychology
