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.
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Literary critic Frederick Crews writes that Sulloway "revolutionized our idea of Freud's scientific affinities and habits", and helped pave the way for subsequent works such as Adolf Grünbaum's The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984), and Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated (1991).