Freud Evaluated

Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc is a 1991 book AbOUT Sigmund Freud by Malcolm Macmillan.

Scholarly reception

The work received a favorable reception from several critics of Freud. It was described by Frederick Crews as "the single most important book about Freud's IDeaS." Allen Esterson calls Freud Evaluated, "a painstaking scholarly and remarkably wide-ranging historically-based critique of Freud's theoretical framework which will remain an invaluable sourcebook for many years to come."

Richard Webster writes that the book is a "valuable resource, full of meticulous readings and close study of the development of Freud's ideas", and contains much important material absent from earlier works such as Frank Sulloway's Freud, Biologist of the Mind. However, he disagrees with Macmillan over the work of French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and medical issues related to hysteria. Webster believes that Macmillan sometimes accepts psychogenic theories of illness too readily, and that greater emphasis should be placed on the role of the neurological and neuropathological complexity of the human organism in the development of disease.

Todd Dufresne calls it, "a strong, comprehensive, although fairly dry, examination of the early history and theory of psychoanalysis".

See also

• Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire
• The Foundations of Psychoanalysis