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This volume possesses the historic interest of being the first sign of life received from the psychoanalytical world on the Continent since the war, it having arrived in December 1944. It was a welcome indication that scientific research in our field has been possible there in spite of the deplorable conditions.
Essentially the book is a second edition of Dr. Laforgue's important and familiar Psychopathologie de l'Echec, published in 1937, the main thesis of which is also well known to English-speaking readers through the translation of the author's The Failure of Beaudelaire, Library of Psycho-Analysis, 1932.
The last chapter of the previous edition has been omitted, and instead we have a long one on Napoleon. According to private information Dr. Laforgue had written one on Hitler, which would doubtless have been more interesting, but he considered it tactful during the occupation to substitute the more harmless study of Napoleon. We note in this an absence of reference to Jekel's penetrating study of him, probably because of inaccessibility to libraries at that time. Dr. Laforgue paints a decidedly romantic picture of Napoleon as the most representative man of the French Revolution—contrary to the present view of him as a counter-revolutionary—and as the saviour of a crumbling France. He attributes the paranoid reactions displayed particularly at St. Helena to the various traumatic incidents attending his birth and early infancy when his mother was being harried in the mountains and had to transfer her babe to wet nurses.
The book, written in Dr. Laforgue's vivid French, will be a welcome addition to psychoanalytical literature.