What, if anything, did Sigmund Freud actually discover? What concrete human knowledge would be lacking if he, or someone very like him, had never lived?

With most scientists, the same questions would not be hard to answer. In the case of William Harvey, we might say: He discovered the circulation of the blood. Though philosophers may tell us that all scientific hypotheses are provisional, no one now seriously expects a future scientist to discover that the blood does not, in fact, circulate.

Freud also claimed to be a scientist in the strictest sense of the word (though his world outlook was more scientistic than scientific), but all of his supposed discoveries, such as that of the Oedipus complex, were highly speculative. With little independent empirical evidence to support them, his theories were more like inventions than discoveries. No one would take seriously a doctor who concluded from the fact that a young man had broken his leg playing football that playing football was the one and only cause of broken legs; but this was more or less Freud’s method.

Nevertheless his claims to be a scientist were widely accredited, particularly later in his life. When he sought refuge in Britain after the Anschluss, he was at once awarded the highest scientific honor that the country could bestow, Fellowship of the Royal Society. Ironically, the Society’s motto is “Nullius in verba” (“On the word of no one”), which is to say that truth does not inhere in anyone’s personal authority, however great it might be. But no one ever used personal authority to more effect than Freud, who was a master of the employment of rhetoric to deflect the need for evidence.

The question remains, what is important about the history of the psychoanalytic movement? It has been written many times, with every possible degree of reverence and hostility toward its founder. (It was perhaps Freud’s greatest achievement that he made it impossible for anyone to be merely indifferent to him.) In his exhaustive and, to be quite frank, exhausting book, “Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis” (Harper, 614 pages, $29.95), George Makari gives us a blow-by-blow account of both Freud’s intellectual development and the institutional development of psychoanalysis. He gives considerably more emphasis to the influence of Freud’s associates on him than other, more heroic accounts that have depicted Freud as the lonely, fearless, persecuted seeker after truth; but I would be less than honest if I said that the details are fascinating. For long passages, the book reads like a soap opera, with the drama removed.

Here, as an aside, I make a plea for thin rather than for fat books, at least for the general reader. (I accept the value of fat books as repositories.) There is more intellect in the distillation than in the accumulation of facts; for facts, unlike men, are not created equal. We busy human beings need guidance as to their importance and significance; and there are, after all, very few subjects of such intrinsic importance that we need to know every last detail about them.

Still, as this book makes very clear, the squabbling of Freud and his early associates had very little to do with truth and evidence, and much to do with power and authority. The sheer vindictive pettiness of the people around Freud does honor neither to the supposed science they were trying to establish nor to the human race. Figures like Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, who chafed against Freud’s increasing autocracy (exercised, of course, for the good of the cause, as autocracy always is), were quick to establish little autocracies of their own. Insofar as the history of the psychoanalytic movement proves anything, it proves that Adler’s theory of human conduct, that the urge to domination was primary, was more intuitively plausible than Freud’s theory ever was.

The subtitle of this book is significant, for it implies that the history of psychoanalysis belongs to cultural rather than to scientific history. No doubt the history of science includes the clash of personalities; but the history of psychoanalysis consists of very little else, unless it be the manner in which it both fit into and helped to form the Zeitgeist.

Indeed, students of religious sectarianism, a subject of some social and political importance nowadays, might find much in this book to interest them. Many people, who not so very long ago would have been unable to state the five pillars of Islam, now discourse learnedly on the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence and on what is halal and haram. They study Islam not because of its intrinsic intellectual importance, but because of its social and political importance, just as they once did Marxism and its sects.

Psychoanalysis was never as important as all that, but W.H. Auden was surely right when, in his poem on the death of Freud, he alluded to a “climate of opinion.” You don’t refute a climate, at least not with a single knock-down argument; climate change, to coin a phrase, happens imperceptibly.

Despite Freud’s many shortcomings — his deficiencies as a scientist, his urge to dominate, his intolerance of opposition, his lack of intellectual scruples — an aura of greatness still hangs over him, as it does not, say, over Adler. No one could dispute that he was a highly intelligent and cultivated man, and a writer of such beguiling talent that he can still be read with pleasure even by those who expect to extract no truth from him. He was one of those figures who, in the wake of the collapse of religion, appeared to many, at least for a short time, to explain humanity to itself. The Freudian claim of explanatory power was false, as was the Marxist claim, and as the Darwinist claim, the most popular such explanatory claim today, will prove to be false. Freud’s fundamental flaw was an overweening ambition, in combination with intellectual impatience. Freud was human, all too human.

Mr. Makari’s conclusion, that, out of all the sordid maneuverings he chronicles in such detail, there nevertheless emerged “the richest systematic description of inner experience that the Western world has produced,” is nonsense. Its very systematization is an impoverishment, not an enrichment, as anyone who has listened to psychoanalysts discuss anything will know. In such discussions, theory trumps description every time. Shakespeare is infinitely richer.

Mr. Dalrymple is a psychiatrist and author of “Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses,” among other books.