The Psychoanalytic Movement - The Cunning of Unreason

How did psychoanalysis become so accepted by the public? This provocative book reconstructs the system of ideas upon which the theory and practice of psychoanalysis rests, describing a modern culture that has created a psychic or a spiritual void that psychoanalysis seems custom-made to fill. Gellner approaches the question as a sociologist and attains a broad perspective on the ideas of the psychoanalytic movement as a system of cultural beliefs.

"One of those iconoclastic masterpieces of skeptical good sense and fine intelligence that you might come across once in ten years if you're lucky." --New Statesman

"In this brilliant book . . . Gellner describes powerfully, and in the most brightly colored prose, the causality of Freudian dogma." --Times (London)