The Technique of Psychoanalysis: By Smith Ely Jelliffe, M.D. (Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., New York and Washington, Monograph Series No. 26, Second, revised, enlarged Edition, 1920. Pp. x+168. 2.50 Dollars.)

After reading this book one is left with three impressions; first, of page-long quotations from Freud and Rank, second, of advice based on the experience of the author, and third, of his philosophy. The quotations are familiar and appropriate and when reading them one cannot help contrasting them with the rest of the book and wondering how an author who quotes so fully from competent analysts can have gained so little insight into the subject; the advice obviously does not originate in deep psycho-analytical experience; the philosophy is unique. We begin with the last. The author is overwhelmed by the age of the earth and the antiquity of man, calculated in millions and millions of years. It affects him so much that he finds it 'advantageous to impress upon patients the immense importance of this time element in the slow elaboration of instinctive reactions which are so highly conservative and protective' and to insist 'upon the fact that the neurosis is in line with the whole process. It also is a bit of conservation—something compensatory and protective.…' (p. 37.)

He correlates the periods of human development (pre-natal, called by him 'Archaic'; birth to seven years, called 'Organ Erotic';1 seven to fourteen years, called 'Narcissistic'; fourteen years onwards, called 'Social') with the Paleozoic, Cenozoic, Mesozoic and 'Psychozoic' epochs respectively. This psycho-paleontology, I have no doubt, means a lot to Dr. Jelliffe, but does he not concentrate too much on 'thought-fossils' (p. 135) to the neglect of the dynamics of his subject? He