Kerr is at his best when showing how inevitable it was that psychoanalysis be plagued by sectarianism and, in its reconstituted core, patched together by enforced ideological conformity. Running through this book, subtly but insistently, is a parallel between psychoanalysis and a modern totalitarian regime in which propaganda campaigns and heresy trials come to preempt free debate.

That analogy becomes inescapable when Kerr recounts the activity of Freud's top-secret "Committee," convened in 1912 by none other than Freud's official biographer-to-be, Ernest Jones, and taking as its mission the shielding of Freud from criticism by promulgating whatever his latest line might be and by heaping ridicule on his opponents. This Orwellian project, which continued until 1926 and remained undisclosed until 1944, guaranteed that the sounding board for Freud's newest fancies, like those of any insecure dictator, would be an echo chamber.