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It is a signal honor for a psychoanalytic writer to have a collection of previously published papers collected into a book. The decision to
compile Grinstein's papers was, to my mind, a very wise one, because essays on applied psychoanalysis are too often written off as merely confirming well-known psychoanalytic theory. Grinstein shows what applied psychoanalysis can be in the hands of a master with vast clinical experience and a gift for meticulous research. The book also includes some clinical studies and a fascinating piece of psychoanalytic detective work.
I will examine Grinstein's four essays on Oscar Wilde in some detail for two reasons: First, his penetrating study of Wilde is probably the best illustration of his method. Second, Grinstein attempts to answer a question that still boggles the mind: Why at the height of his career (he had just completed An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, both produced in 1895) did Wilde engage the Marquess of Queensberry in the disastrous litigation that led ultimately to his imprisonment and ruin? What unconscious guilt or need for punishment overrode all common sense? Wilde lied to his counsel when he brought the criminal libel suit against Queensberry, claiming that there was absolutely no truth to the latter's allegations that Wilde was a sodomite. And why, after the second trial, when the noose was palpably tightening, did Wilde refuse to flee England in spite of the entreaties of his counsel, his wife, and his friends that he do so?
In his first paper Grinstein examines The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891, one year before Wilde began his disastrous relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, Queensberry's son. It appears that Wilde had undergone some personality changes in the three years preceding the publication of the novel. Colleagues who knew him said he had visibly changed, and become unpleasant and bloated. He was haunted by unrequited desire. “In his Letters from Reading Gaol,” Grinstein