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An American barber with a Scotch name, famous as a chess player, but who had never been on the links and did not know a 'niblick' from a 'driver', once wrote a book on The Game of Golf, which consisted of a series of quotations from the writings of certain experts on the game. A sports editor suggested that the book had been written with a pair of scissors and a paste pot. The Structure and Meaning of Psychoanalysis, consisting of several hundred pages of quotations from psycho-analytical literature and some literature not strictly psycho-analytical, interspersed with the suggestions of the compilers as to desirable changes in terminology and other minor matters, seems somehow to belong on the shelf with the barber's book.
Drs. Healy and Bronner, the major writers of the book, have for several decades been known for their painstaking work in the study of juvenile delinquency in connection with the children's courts of Chicago and Boston. Their technique has been developed largely in the fields of social-case work and so-called clinical psychology, and most of their contributions have been at the statistical and descriptive levels. They have not practised psycho-analysis, have avoided the subject in their writings, and in certain analytical circles are known to be actively ambivalent. A book, therefore, with so pretentious a title, coming out of years of work in another field and written by unanalysed persons, should arrest the attention of psycho-analysis, as rather an astonishing undertaking. Through the years since Professor Freud began to record his observations and to follow his astute speculations there have appeared certain followers who have developed to a level where they not only wisely discuss Freud's formulations, but have in instances elaborated upon them or have travelled far along trails blazed by him; a record of their progress is available in their writings or in the training Institutes that they direct; all have been virile writers and some hav