This book is a masterpiece in its appreciation of a strand of Freud's writing which is truly radical, and which is ignored both by Freud's critics and by his American clinical exponents. Jacoby's work shows the way conformism creeps not only into American pop psychology, but also into American psychoanalysis. His is a liberationist Freud, and his account of American conformists (largely the humanistic psychologists) is very telling in regard to their internal contradictions and their loss of the deeply critical, restless dimension which makes Freud's thinking so alive.
This book is extremely crisply written. It has a great many very wonderful lines, e.g. "what Marx said of Bentham, that he was a genius of bourgeois stupidity, could also be said of Maslow, except that Maslow was no genius." One has the sense that it was crafted by a mind on fire.