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A study, forty-five pages in length, of a male patient arrested and committed to an asylum for the criminal insane for the offence of writing a series of extremely obscene letters to various prominent people.
These letters, the author explains, could not be presented in their original form 'because of extreme obscenity and vulgarity'. Mere abstracts of some of them are given in the article. This delicacy on the part of the author deprived the article of what chance it had of being of some value as a psychoanalytic document. The letters, unmutilated, might have revealed many symbolic expressions and other material which would have thrown some light on the motives which led to their being written. One may look in vain for such enlightenment in the article itself. It is a typical institutional descriptive anamnesis, with a wealth of meaningless detail, varied here and there with occasional futile attempts to apply analytic interpretation.
The author states that his analysis shows that the writing of the obscene letters was an absolute emotional necessity to the patient to satisfy some of his unconscious strivings. That the letters doubtless were such a necessity, we can readily agree. But that the author has shown them to be such can be denied with almost equal readiness. What the unconscious strivings actually were, and why they made the writing of such letters a necessity, is really not explained in any satisfactory manner. The assertion the letters represent 'an attempt to gain satisfaction from the world of phantasy' which would 'compensate for an inability to effect a normal adjustment in reality, ' is a mere truism that explains nothing. If the author had simply said that the patient wrote such letters because he was abnormal, one would have understood the matter almost as well as after reading this lengthy article.