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This book is of little current interest, its chief value being that of an historical record of certain aspects of the development of psycho-therapy. Psycho-analysis is dismissed in five pages of a very garbled account. The author stigmatizes it as 'vaultingly ambitious', 'magical' and 'paradoxical'. The author's news about the psycho-analytic movement seems to be nearly twenty years old. Of the eight pupils of Freud whom he mentions (two of whose names, by the way, are mis-spelt) only two or three would now be accounted as Freudians. He notes that psycho-analysis has spread from Austria to Switzerland, but does not mention that it has ever reached Germany!
The author repeats in this book his old accusation, which he has every reason to know to be untrue, that Freud learnt of Janet's discoveries on his visit to Paris, appropriated them, but that, only half understanding them, he was led into the distortions and exaggerations that constitute psycho-analysis. This accusation has several times been disproved in detail, so that it need not be further rebutted here.
In spite of the subsequent unfruitfulness of his work, Janet's name would always deserve honourable mention in the history of clinical psychology for the brilliancy of his early observations and experiments. Unfortunately it now seems possible, however, that his name may chiefly be remembered as that of a man who repeatedly calumniated a fellow-worker and who did not possess moral courage and rectitude enough to retract the false innuendoes when they were disproved to the world.