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Bonaventura, the director of the psychological laboratory of the University of Florence, 1 is generally esteemed as a serious psychologist. It is the first time that a good summary of psycho-analysis—outside the sphere of psycho-analysts—comes from the pen of an Italian psychologist, who recognises this science as a very important inquiry. Bonaventura's aim was to give the educated layman a correct conception of psycho-analysis; therefore this treatise has the advantages and the disadvantages of any exposition. It is distinguished by a clear style, by a simplified, easily intelligible representation and by a well-arranged combination of the material. All more complicated phenomena and connections, the most important problems which analysts have put to themselves and which still remain open, are naturally not mentioned. Although the author has slipped into a few inexact or slight erroneous statements, this does not however sensibly diminish the value of the book. Some illustrations, strewn here and there in the book, have not any reference to the subject in question or, in any case, a very superficial one as, for instance, the picture of a catatonic man, or of an old demented woman, and the drawing made by a schizophrenic.
We will now give a brief report on the contents of the ten chapters in which psycho-analysis is explained. The author introduces the reader to the sphere of treatment with the description of apparently senseless symptoms which prove to be connected with emotional events. After mentioning the pre-analytical conception of such phenomena, he reports on the well-known case of Anna O., treated, in 1881, by Joseph Breuer, and thus the author comes to describe the historical development of the new method, from catharsis to psycho-analysis. Freud's psycho-analysis has arisen from the knowledge of the hidden meaning that apparently senseless symptoms have. Hypnosis was then abandoned and replaced by the methods of free associations.
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