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LESLIE H. FARBER, M.D.: The Ways of the Will. New York: Basic Books, 1966, 226 pages, $5, 95.
I FOUND LESLIE FARBER'S The Ways of the Will an astonishing book. I had encountered two of the essays in it before, the now-famous "I'm Sorry, Dear" in Commentary and the splendid "Martin Buber and Psychiatry" in Psychiatry. Except for an introductory chapter, the remainder of the book appeared earlier in the Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, or the Journal of Existential Psychiatry, neither of which I have ever seen, a sadness for me if they ever regularly featured articles at all like those of Dr. Farber's. It is not often one meets up with a psychoanalyst who is sensible, humane, witty, and literate—without feeling any need to disguise those qualities when he writes.
Nor do all psychiatrists share Farber's philosophical and theological interests. Because Freud had very little personal use for organized religion (though a lot of Messianic spirit) and a good deal of contempt for academic philosophers (though enough fearful regard for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to avoid them, lest he discover himself a follower of theirs), his more slavish, self-limited—and self-styled—successors have cut down with a vengeance whatever metaphysical (in contrast to metapsychological) yearnings they or their students may have. The result we all know: journals filled with pretentiously mechanistic talk, complicated oversimplifications, and indeed flights of speculative fancy that make St. Thomas Aquinas