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The Art of Captaincy. By M. Brearley. (Pp. 288; illustrated; £12.95.) Hodder & Stoughton: London. 1985

Like him or loathe him, Sigmund Freud remains difficult to ignore. In this widely assorted quintet of books his work is the focus of a social anthropologist, a psychologist, a literary scholar, a poet and a philosopher respectively. Professor Gellner regards psychoanalysis rather as Gibbon viewed Christianity and his compact, scholarly critique attempts to account for its impact by tracing the intellectual origins of the 'coming of unreason' and demonstrating the nature of its survival kit as consisting in not only a doctrine but also 'an institution, a technique, an organisation, an ethic, a theory of knowledge, an idiom and a climate of opinion'. Professor Eysenck also makes a Gibbonian genuflection in the title of his essay, but this is an altogether more superficial assault on psychoanalysis which concentrates on its scientific defects and argues for its demotion to the status of 'historical curiosity'. Polemicists of this type, however, fail to recognize the truth of Guntrip's riposte, that 'The work of Freud will never be safer than when it evokes hostility'. Nor do they appreciate the role of psychoanalytical metaphor in the work of its most potent publicists, the many creative artists who have incorporated aspects of the system in their work. Jeffrey Berman's study of the literary representations of psychoanalysis illustrates the process by reference to nine well-known writers, most of whom suffered personal experience of mental disorder. And the highly neurotic poetess, Hilda Dolittle, better known as H. D., expresses a characteristically personal debt of gratitude in her tribute to the 'blameless physician', now reprinted in a revised version. Finally, Professor Wollheim draws heavily on psychoanalytical theory in the philosophical discussion of personhood which lies at the centre of his 1982 William James lectures. Psychoanalysis may have been an illusion but, to borrow the words of its founder, it was an illusion with a future. The Art of Captaincy. By M. Brearley. (Pp. 288; illustrated; £12.95.) Hodder & Stoughton: London. 1985.