Psycho-Analysis and the Psychic Disorder of General Paralysis: By Stefan Hollós and Dr. S. Ferenczi. Translated by Gertrude M. Barnes and Gunther Keil. (Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., 1925. Pp. 48. Price $1.50.)

In one way this is an epoch-making little work, since it is the first attempt to discover whether some of the characteristic symptoms of an organic psychosis can be made more intelligible by the aid of psycho-analysis; not that Dr. Hollós has subjected general paralysis to psycho-analytical technique, but that he gives us his own interpretation of certain symptoms in his patients—as in applied psycho-analysis.

It is especially from a study of the delusions respecting age, time, duration, numbers and such like, that he concludes that these wishfulfilments relate to the inception of the disease (either the syphilis or the first mental difficulties) as if the patient is seeking to escape from the truths of reality (the facts of his disease) from that date onward. In other words, general paralysis is a patho-psychosis analogous to Ferenczi's pathoneurosis. The delusions of strength and well-being are a reaction against the patient's weakness and malaise; while the depression in the depressed cases is found by interpretation again to refer to the malady itself.

In addition to all this, the physical degeneration of the cerebral cortex weakens the repressing forces of the patient and he therefore regresses to the infantile instinctual life which is psycho-analytically so familiar to the readers of this JOURNAL, the colouring of the clinical picture varying as the man is, for example, strongly narcissistic, oral-erotic, or sadistically analerotic.