Eine Autoergographie Sigmund Freuds: Die Medizin der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, herausgegeben von Professor Dr. L. R. Grote. Bd. IV. (Verlag Felix Meiner, Leipzig, 1925.)

All psycho-analysts will regard the fourth volume of Medizin der Gegenwart as specially valuable, for it contains Freud's Selbstdarstellung, a paper in which the intimate personal delineation is as delicate as the account of his work is powerful and clearly outlined. Much of what Freud has already told in the History of the Psycho-Analytical Movement (1914) we meet here in 'a new context in which subjective and objective exposition and biographical and historical interest are blended'. Freud gives the subject new and fresh applications and to some extent writes in greater detail than before; for example, in his account of his life as a student and an assistant, of his relations with Charcot, the work done in common with Breuer, the painful but inevitable break with him and the defection of Jung and Adler. In addition, he describes the development of the movement since the History appeared.

Freud has succeeded in giving an exposition of the content of psycho-analysis in a remarkably condensed form, characterized by pithy phrases and a series of new and amazingly concise formulations. Every psycho-analyst will take a peculiar pleasure in these, while, on the other hand, they are calculated to clear up fundamental misunderstandings in those who are outside the movement.