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This is an unusually interesting autobiography, written with honesty, candour and perhaps a little naivety. Forel had certainly a great personality, one which remains vivid in the present writer's memory, and he had many claims to be regarded as a great man. He was a leading cerebral neurologist, being incidentally the first man to cut a section of the human brain and the first to propound the neurone theory, a distinguished psychiatrist, whose books on suggestion and sexuality won him a wide reputation, a fearless administrator and social pioneer; last, but not least, he was one of the greatest entomologists of his time, being pre-eminent in the field of myrmecology. He rebelled vigorously against many of the shams and the weaknesses of human nature which he encountered on his path and left an enduring mark on the life of his native country, where his fight against alcoholism and against prostitution gained him many enemies.
When he encountered psycho-analysis his pioneer days were over and he was fighting then only for settled convictions. Moreover, his capacity for psychological insight was decidedly limited, his spare mental energies being taken up with combating what was evidently a chronic cyclothymia. He therefore brushed it aside as one more of the pieces of nonsense he had encountered in his life. In connection with the meeting of the International Union for Medical Psychology and Psychotherapy at Zürich in 1912, where he presided, he writes: 'The Freudians with their usual vanity and