The aim of Secrets of the Soul is to articulate the ambiguous legacy of psychoanalysisat once its profound influence on modern thought and its persistent marginality. Secrets of the Soul sets the stage for its psychoanalytic players not within the discipline itself but within the "threefold promise" of modernity-autonomy, women's liberation, and democracycharacteristic of the second industrial revolution (the rise of mass production and consumption). Eli Zaretsky, a historian at the New School University in New York City, hopes to show that psychoanalysis was to the second industrial revolution what Calvinism was to the first industrial revolution: a revolutionary theory of interiority that both facilitated and complicated the modern project.
This is an ambitious agenda, and Zaretsky's argument is inventive. Secrets of the Soul follows the time line of the second industrial revolution, beginning with Freud and Fordism, moving through the ego psychologists and the New Deal, and then through the postwar leftwing psychoanalysts, the Keynesian Welfare State, and beyond. He examines psychoanalytic innovators around the world such as Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Anna Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, other Frankfurt School thinkers, and even Freud himself, with respect to their various efforts to liberate women and homosexuals, to fight fascism all over the world, and to help modern men and women live autonomous authentic lives. The chapters weave together their stories, a narrative of Freud's own ambivalent participation in the "modernity" project, and the thematic threads of the "threefold promise." The result is a book of broad scope that documents the ambiguous legacy of analytic ideas internationally and tries to revive the optimism of the golden age of psychoanalysis for our own time.
Unfortunately, Zaretsky is not as careful with the details as he should be, and the reader cannot always be certain about the veracity of his claims. He frequently reconfigures or fails to document fully the complexity of his subject matter, requiring readers, for instance, to be familiar with "Keynesianism," "the Popular Front," "Fordism," and many other "isms" while offering little effort to define, contextualize, or even problematize them. He dances through his primary and secondary sources quickly, too, often plucking out one relevant theme while ignoring the full intent of his authors. As an example, he positions his book as an important successor and corrective to Carl Schorske's Fin de Siรจcle Vienna (1981), claiming that Fin de Siรจcle Vienna was the "one great attempt to grasp psychoanalysis historically" (p. 4). But Fin de Siรจcle Vienna is not about Freud but about Vienna; there is only one chapter on Freud in the entire book. Zaretsky correctly recognizes that Schorske is interested in the fragmentation of Enlightenment ideas in fin-de-siรจcle Viennese culture, and that Schorske prepared the way for historians to examine the relationship between politics, culture, and psychoanalysis. But Zaretsky leaves the impression that Fin de Siรจcle Vienna is, in the end, about psychoanalysis-a vast simplification of Schorske's much more nuanced and complex story. It is unclear if Zaretsky's reconfiguring of Schorske's argument undermines his own; it is clear, however, that such liberties with his sources render the book and its argument problematic.
Historians of the mind sciences can enjoy Secrets of the Soul for its understanding of twentieth-century "modernity" and for injecting a necessary strain of cultural history into the