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Readers of this JOURNAL will find this little work instructive for the concise critical survey it gives of the most important theories dealing with the problem of hysteria, with special reference to those of French workers. Psycho-analytic views receive due prominence. The work is also a plea for psycho-analysis: the author is concerned to shew that the other theories are under a heavy obligation to it and generally that the explanation which psycho-analysis puts forward is not in conflict but in entire accord with other accounts. An exception must be made for Babinski's pithiatism, which, however, scarcely finds support nowadays even in France.
The author rightly begins with the point that while it is true that Freud has revealed the motives and unconscious content of the illness, together with its dynamics and its economics, nevertheless the actual mechanism of hysteria, or more specifically the mechanism of conversion, is still an unsolved problem. The author seeks to find an explanation in the factor of regression to magical processes, in which thought, expression and performance are one, so that ideas, phantasies and symbols always emerge in connection with their somatic manifestations. (As we know Ferenczi explained many hysterical symptoms as 'magical gestures'.) But, so long as we fail to understand the magical process itself either in its physiological or its psychological aspect, the establishment of the equation shews just as much that we can proceed from our knowledge of hysteria to throw light on the magical process as in the reverse direction. The presence of magical processes in hysteria is said by the author to depend on fixation as a static factor and on regression as a dynamic one. In opposition to him, we should feel more disposed to regard regression as a topographical phenomenon, the dynamics of which are to be found partly in the repetition-compulsion and partly in intolerably powerful or else in inadequate cathexes of recent layers, so