Ludwig Marcuse Sigmund Freud. Sein Bild vom Menschen (Sigmund Freud: His Image of Man) Diogenes Verlag, 1972 and 2006 (First published 1956 by Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg), 252 pp. ISBN 06527 First published by Rowohlt in 1956, on the 100th anniversary of Freud’s birth, and kept in print by Diogenes since 1972, this book is an elegant and bold essay in the history of ideas. Marcuse (not to be confused with Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist theorist) deals briskly with the strictly medical antecedents of psychology and Freud’s own early medical career. For the author the transition from physiology to psychology, from science to the humanities, is a very positive development – and one which, incidentally, takes him into the areas where presumably he feels most comfortable: literature and philosophy. Indeed, perhaps what most interests Marcuse is the way in which Freud formulates what has been prefigured by writers and philosophers, by the poet-psychologists as he calls them at one point. Remarks made in passing sometimes – but then the discovery of meaning in the apparently trivial or meaningless is central to Freud’s work. Marcuse draws particular attention to Freud as philosopher, despite his mistrust of philosophic systems, and again as a writer, despite his distance from contemporary writing, even from that of Schnitzler, who was both influenced by Freud and anticipated something of his method. Central to the book are two ‘essays within the essay’. The first is on the relationship of Heinrich Heine and Freud, in which Marcuse goes as far as to speak of a ‘Seelenwanderung’ – a transfer of souls – between the poet dying in 1856 and the psychologist born in the same year. The second, on Kierkegaard and Freud, focuses on the significance of fear for each thinker, and on their shared view of its necessity. In addition to all this Marcuse sums up the principal categories of Freudian psychology, the history of Freudianism as a movement up to the 1930s, its growth and its fragmentation. There is also a particularly unpleasant pro-Nazi quote from Jung in 1934, in which Freud is accused of ‘unreflectedly applying Jewish categories to the Christian German’ – but adding that perhaps the ‘mighty phenomenon of National Socialism’ has taught him more sense. Though obviously of its time, this book remains a stimulating text, and a notable piece of literature in its own right.