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This book is one of a series of publications dealing with the conditio humana, a collection that contains, among other works, important psychoanalytic contributions that have long been unavailable in German—a study edition of Freud's works in ten volumes, with commentaries, the first such edition in German, as well as the work of Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, Karl Abraham, and Sándor Ferenczi. It might be of interest to the non-German reader that S. Fischer Verlag was the most outstanding publishing house in Germany before and after the First World War (they published Thomas Mann, among others) and after having been suppressed by the Nazis have today regained their preeminent position.
Dr. Wolfgang Loch is Professor of Psychoanalysis on the Medical Faculty at the University of Tübingen. He is also an internist and a neurologist. This collection of his papers, originally published between 1959 and 1970, reflects the wide scope of Loch's interests: it contains articles on theory, technique, and therapy, as well as a section devoted to psychoanalytic contributions to the understanding of psychosis.
In their introduction, the editors call attention to the main thrust of Loch's book—the danger that authoritarian education imposes for the development of the superego. The editors further stress that inasmuch as the author deals with basic problems of the conditio humana—with anxiety, aggression, suicide, psychosis, myth, choice of partners—his work deserves to be placed in this series.
Loch sets himself a very difficult task and succeeds in its execution. In nearly all of his papers he deals not only with the analytic history of his subject, beginning with Freud, but also with the current state of psychoanalytic thinking; he tries to bridge this latter with German psychiatry, philosophy, and anthropology. He has a highly cultivated audience in mind, but is aware that his readers may not be as well-grounded in psychoanalysis as he would perhaps like. He has to be did