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One of the most interesting considerations in connexion with this book is the reception it has been afforded, even in some quarters where enlightenment and a scientific attitude might have been expected. It has been termed an obvious invention, a literary fraud, a disgusting and perverted portraiture of a young girl's mind: all of which is very significant to the psycho-analyst, helping to confirm Freud's view that the recognition of disturbing truth must inevitably be met with profound resistance. Those who have some psychological knowledge and experience and are capable of reading without bias will agree that we have rarely been presented with so genuinely convincing a document, with one so bearing the stamp of sincerity, reality, and we may add, normality. It is true that the form may present certain problems—such as the quantity produced in the given time, the concentration involved, the high standard in a literary sense—but these are not unusual characteristics, especially when we remember that the writer was a very precocious Austrian child brought up in a cultured and intellectual environment. That her diary seems to many readers 'abnormal' is no doubt due to the barrier existing between the child and adult, which prevents, save in rare circumstances, free expression on the part of the