Clinical: Theodor Friedrichs. Zur Psychologie der Hypnose und der Suggestion. With a preface by Artur Kronfeld. Kleine Schriften zur Seelenforschung, H. 1, Stuttgart 1922, G. Püttmann.

This is a short article, full of material, which purposes to give 'a uniform psychological conception of the phenomena of hypnotism and suggestion, and their common explanation, based on the same dynamics of affects and impulses which we consider fundamental in the theory of the neuroses, the sphere of schizophrenia, and even in characterology proper'. After thirteen years, Ferenczi's fundamental work 'Introjektion und bertragung' has come at last to be fully appreciated as the solution of the problems of hypnotism and suggestion by derivation from the child's attitude to its parents. Ferenczi's work is very fully quoted, and Freud's Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego is fully taken into account. The author is in error when he states that Freud considers the affects which bind children to their parents as purely sexual ones.

The relationship of the author's ideas to those of Schilder, 'ber das Wesen der Hypnose' (J. Springer, 1922), is a particularly close one. The editor therefore mentions that Friedrichs had completed his manuscript sometime before Schilder's work appeared.

Friedrichs doubts whether in hypnosis homosexual components should always be considered active between persons of the same sex—which is 'only an assumption to fit the theory', he says—and this indicates the limits of his assent to psychoanalytic conceptions, and also the limits of his understanding of the wider meaning of unconscious homosexuality. The psycho-analytic solutions of the problems of hypnotism and suggestion are, however, on the way to be more generally acknowledged.