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We are apprised of a new Star in the West. Before the War Dr. Kempf's name was not known in Europe, but since the War sundry rumours have reached us from America announcing the high esteem in which his work is there held. One gathers that he is regarded as an exceedingly original thinker and investigator in psychopathology as well as being the leading psycho-analyst in America. A certain note in Dr. Kempf's writings, and the tone in which he presumably allows his work to be advertised, makes one wonder whether he altogether regards this estimate of his standing with disfavour. It was with no little curiosity and sense of expectation, therefore, that we turned to the magnum opus before us.
And it truly is a ponderous tome. Massive in both size and weight, excellently produced, and lavishly decked with interesting and beautiful illustrations, it can be described by no other word. As a first orientation we inquired into the author's sense of obligation to his precedessors in this field, a not unnatural procedure with a book which is a passionate defence of psycho-analysis. We noted that the names of such leading analysts as Abraham, Brill, Ferenczi, and Rank do not occur at all in the index, nor does that of Jung. Adler's name occurs once only—a fact all the more striking since the book is distinctly Adlerian in tone—and Freud's name six times only. Of these six one is given in error; in a second one Freud is classed among such analysts as Morton Prince and Boris Sidis, so that the author seems to conceive of psycho-analysis in a distinctly catholic sense; in a third one Freud is quoted as warning against the indiscriminate cultivation of transference; in two others Freud's conception of 'conversion' is criticised in the following manner. It is 'a biological riddle and utterly unintelligible' (p. 5). 'It is not only confusing but unnecessary … It is nothing less than a reductio ad absurdum to assume that repressed anger can be "converted" into a physical dis