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Although psycho-analysis has in recent years aroused more popular interest than any other school or branch of psychology, popular understanding, such as it is, is still largely confined to the earlier stages of psycho-analytic discovery and theory. This is doubtless due to some extent to the fact that the earlier discoveries were so often of a 'shocking' kind—with the result that some of those who learned of them definitely turned their backs on the school and all its works, since it seemed to be immoral and subversive, while others (eventually a far larger number) were attracted by the lure of the revolutionary, the unrespectable and the forbidden. When in later years the attention of psycho-analysts was directed increasingly to the ego and the super-ego rather than to the id, the former class of potential readers were already too deeply committed to their disapproval to expect anything good of the new developments, while the latter found these developments less lurid and enticing than the previous revelations and hence were less inclined to pay attention to them.
Partly, however, the lack of understanding may be put down to the lack of suitable synoptic presentation of these later developments. Even serious students of psychology have for many years been hard put to it to find, for instance, suitable up-to-date general presentations of the super-ego doctrine in its various developments and for the more general public there was for long hardly a single book that presented this doctrine with suitable emphasis and detail and in appropriately palatable form. Indeed, from the very beginning of psycho-analysis there have been surprisingly few endeavours to deal generally and impartially with the bearing of psycho-analytic findings upon the problems of ethics. It is this very necessary task that Dr. Odier has undertaken in this book, which may be said to be an attempt to expound the psycho-analytic doctrine of the super-ego and to examine its relation to current reli