"In Freud's Answer, Martin Wain provides the first coherent view of the roots of Freudian psychoanalysis."--BOOK JACKET. "In the new urban industrial age of the late nineteenth century, Mr. Wain shows, 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. The French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution had overturned the old order but had left the new masses of individuals on their own, lacking the certainties of the old life. Now that authority in the form of the king, the church, and the family had lost its power, the new liberal democracies needed new means of control."--BOOK JACKET. "Freud and the other pioneers of psychoanalysis provided the way. Their treatment - designed to preserve a form of government they found highly desirable - was a set of theoretical concepts and practices so effective that for a hundred years they held sway, powerfully affecting a myriad of endeavors. Freud's Answer for the first time clearly illuminates one of the major intellectual phenomena of our age."--Jacket.