If, as is increasingly clear, Freudian psychoanalysis is neither scientifically respectable nor therapeutically efficacious, what exactly was Freud up to? In Freud's Answer, Martin Wain argues that in the new urban industrial age of the late nineteenth century, Freud and his colleagues were social, political, and economic therapists in the broadest sense. Their patient was modern Western culture at a time of disorder and maximum danger. Their treatment was a set of theoretical concepts and practices that carried deep, suggestive, symbolic messages so effective and desirable that for a hundred years they held sway, influencing a myriad of human endeavors. 'Freud's Answer is certain to provoke controversy; it is equally certain that it will have to be reckoned with.'-Glenn Branch, Amazon.com.