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Perhaps it will seem a far cry from the undiscovered murderer to the surprised psychologist. Nevertheless the former individual may be relied upon sooner or later to produce a surprised detective, and we know that analyst and detective have at least one feature in common in the attention they pay to matters of detail. It may be remembered that Reik regarded the mental processes involved in the detection of crime as calling for psychological investigation and that they were then found to be more complicated than one might at first have been inclined to suppose. Few would be prepared to maintain that the mental processes involved in analysing a patient, or putting it more generally, in inferring and understanding the unconscious mental processes in another were exclusively or principally a conscious intellectual operation. But hitherto no comprehensive attempt had been made to arrive at a clearer understanding of them. This is the formidable task which the author has undertaken in the present volume, one which has not been rendered lighter by the fact that it involved 'describing things which almost elude description'.
Reik first examines the nature of the material on the basis of which we infer that one or another process is taking place in the unconscious of a given person. To begin with it may be divided into elements which are taken in consciously viâ the different sense-organs, sight, hearing, touch, etc., and those which are observed unconsciously. The latter group, and the more important of the two, can be further resolved into subgroups. In one of these, reception still takes place viâ the usual sense-organs, although (states of hyperæsthesia excepted) the perceptions are not made consciously. Trifling movements and gestures, physical attitudes, modulations of voice, a thousand nuances and subtle shades of expression belong to this category. But over and above these, it is very probable that we receive tidings of the unconscious viâ senses which have