Talks on Psychotherapy: By William Brown, M.A., M.D. (Oxon.), D.Sc., M.R.C.P. (Lond.), Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy in the University of Oxford. (University of London Press, Ltd., London, 1923. Pp. 96. Price 2 s. 6 d.)

Another volume by this prolific writer. We are not told to what audience it is addressed. On psycho-analytical topics the author is guilty of a number of confused and inaccurate statements. Thus, in speaking of war shock, he says (p. 30) that many of the cases (i.e. patients) 'merely suffered from fear'. Yet on the very same page we gather that the patients' fearfulness was itself the 'cause of the repression'. The author's conception of the technique of free association is indicated in the word italicized in the following passage (p. 49):

Letting the patient say what comes uppermost in his mind in relation, say, to his symptoms, or to different parts of his dreams or to anything you may like to start off with.

In the same way one word is enough to indicate the author's knowledge of the mechanism of transference in analysis (p. 38):

It (i.e. the transference) enables the patient to live again through earlier experiences of his life in relation to the physician and thus become freed from their harmful effects.

The following passage (p. 79) is wildly untrue:

Freud claims to have proved determinism. He claims that that is one of the three advances that he has made in psychological science.

Apart from its not being Freud's manner to 'claim' anything in regard to his writings, anyone who has read these must know that Freud merely assumes determinism as the only possible working hypothesis for science, in exactly the same way as every other scientific man does.