ABSTRACT
Richard S. Westfall has written the standard biography of Isaac Newton's personal life and scientific career, Never at Rest (1980). Its author, an eminent historian and philosopher of science at Indiana University, and a prominent contributor to Newtonian scholarship, offers a strikingly mixed assessment of Frank E. Manuel's A Portrait of Isaac Newton (1968), a psychoanalytic biography. Westfall praises Manuel's description of the scientist's life and times, but doubts the evidence and empirical foundations of his "psychoanalysis of Newton." While discovering few if any factual inaccuracies and while
finding the text enlightening, Westfall remains unconvinced about the verifiability of Manuel's interpretations. In fact, he expresses deeply ambivalent feelings, including epistemological ambivalence:
In his bibliographical essay, Westfall again questions the psychoanalytical component of Manuel's approach, advising students interested in Newton to disentangle the narrative from the critical sections: "It also offers a Freudian analysis of the roots of Newton's character which may or may not be true, but can be separated from the portrait of Newton, on which it is empirically based."2
