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The reputation of yet another professor of psychology for sanity of judgement has foundered on the rock of psycho-analysis. Professor Laumonier gives first an account of psycho-analysis and what he calls 'le Freudisme', and follows this with two chapters of criticism. 'The criticism' runs the usual course and comes to the conclusion that all the fundamental tenets of psycho-analysis are moonshine. Thus, there is no unconscious mind, only a physiological substratum, and this being disposed of everything else follows. The only noteworthy difference between Professor Laumonier's criticisms and those with which we are so familiar is the low order of intelligence they display. Thus he thinks the myth of infantile sexuality has arisen through children being viewed through adult eyes. If adults generally believed in infantile sexuality and a sceptic produced good reasons for doubting that belief, the criticism here brought forward by the author might have its good point, but, the situation being what it is, the comment is merely topsy-turvy. Then he seriously regards the fact that many girls grow up without having any 'precise notions of sexuality' as disproving the theory of repression of infantile sexuality, whereas investigation of just these cases furnishes the best evidence in support of it. Symbolism is dealt with in the following way: A number of examples are quoted from Shakespeare and other poets and no distinction whatever drawn between unconscious symbolism, metaphor and flowery allegory. Treating them all as being examples of symbolism in the psycho-analytical sense, he then asks rhetorically why we should prefer Freud's interpretation to Shakespeare's.
In accounting for Freud's perverse views he accepts Aschaffenburg's fictitious assumption that Freud's practice was first confined to sexual perverts and that he then generalized from these. The milieu at Vienna is once more made responsible, an explanation which Freud well declared to be 'quite especi