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This book is an expression of the wide-felt need for a detailed reconsideration of the problems of marriage in the light of modern social tendencies and psychological research. One would have thought that this aim could have been best achieved by a harmonious presentation by one hand, or at the most by two. Instead, Count Keyserling, the editor, has simply put together a series of independent essays written by no fewer than twenty-four authors. This fact in itself makes the book impossible to review adequately, for the contributions are necessarily of very unequal value and overlap one another considerably. To deal with all the views expressed would need a brochure.
Nevertheless the book provides an extremely interesting browsing ground, and for this purpose we would specially recommend the essays by Frobenius, on 'Mother-right'; Wassermann, on 'Bourgeois Marriage'; and Thomas Mann, on 'Marriage in Transition'. We note that, although there are contributions by Jung, Adler, Havelock Ellis, and Maeder, there is none by any psycho-analyst, unless we are to include von Hattingburg as such. To exclude, or nearly so, all that psycho-analysis has to say on the innumerable problems connected with marriage is enough in itself to vitiate the claim of the book to represent modern thought.