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One approaches this posthumous book of Freud's, the last in the famous series of the Gesammelte Schriften, with some emotion. And indeed the interest in it is largely a pious one, since it offers us little new of scientific value. The reason for this is that its most important contents are already familiar to the readers of the JOURNAL and Zeitschrift. None the less we are glad to see them collected together in this abiding form.
The first three contributions, on the subject of the Studien über Hysterie, are of some historical interest. They consist of a letter to Dr. Breuer, and two sketches on the theory of that work. One observes that, in spite of starting out from the trauma theory, Freud already at that early date (1893) was engrossed with the important problem of why relatively insignificant events prove traumatic to one person. From this he was led on into investigation of the constitutional factor which was in large part responsible for those events becoming traumatic. One of Freud's most valuable discoveries, and one even yet inadequately appreciated, was that neither a constitutional factor nor a traumatic event alone can cause a complicated end product, e.g. a neurotic conflict, and not even a combination of the two in general, but only the combination of a specific constitutional factor with a specific trauma that intrinsically matches it.
There follows a clever analysis of an apparently prophetic dream where Freud shows natural psychological determinants of what could easily be regarded in an occultistic fashion. The next contribution, on Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy, was incorporated in his well-known publication on this topic, though, being designed for a private audience, it is written more broadly and freely. There is a charming address to the members of the Verein B'nai B'rith, on the occasion of their congratulation on his seventieth birthday. He recalls how he had become a member of this brotherhood, a Jewish Club somewhat akin to our Fr