Correspondence

To the Editor:

“I would like to call the attention of the readers of the Bulletin and of the members of the American Psychoanalytic Association to the significant, provocative book, THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION—Essays on Literature and Society, written by Lionel Trilling of Columbia University and published by the Viking Press, New York, 1950.

Mr. Trilling is a literary critic and a novelist who reveals a critical understanding of Freud, recognizes the genuine contributions of Freud to the fields of art, literature and the social sciences and demonstrates the brooding of an intelligence psychoanalytically sensitized to the literary world of ideas.

The book consists of a series of poignant essays, beautifully written, whose unity (as the author states in his preface) ‘derives from an abiding interest in the ideas of what we loosely call liberalism, especially the relation of these ideas to literature.’

Three chapters will interest psychoanalysts, specifically 1) Freud and Literature, 2) Art and Neurosis and 3) The Kinsey Report, and generally the many penetrating comments of psychoanalytic import throughout the rest of the chapters.

Some time ago, Trilling reviewed Freud's OUTLINE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS in the Book Review Section of the New York Times and here reflected his sympathetic understanding and aesthetic appreciation of Freud. THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION is highly recommended for inclusion in those seminars at the institutes which deal with the applications of psychoanalysis to the allied fields of art, literature and sociology.

Joseph J. Michaels, M.D.
Boston, Mass.”

To the Editor:

“As you know it was announced at the meeting (Detroit, 1950) at the last minute that Dr. Lehrman would show movies taken in 1928 of the members of the Berlin and the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institutes and of Freud and his family in Vienna. It was fortunate that he showed these films in the large ball room because there was an enormous crowd there,