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Ella Sharpe's wide range of interests, both in clinical psycho-analysis and in the application of psycho-analysis to æsthetic problems, makes it impossible for the reviewer to attempt to do more than draw attention to a few aspects of the work of an analyst who possessed, in addition to her scientific knowledge, literary and imaginative gifts of an altogether exceptional kind.
The papers included in this volume have been divided by the editor into three groups. The first, Papers on Technique, contains seven lectures on this subject and 'The Psycho-Analyst' (1947), which was to have been the first chapter of a book entitled Talks to Students of Psycho-Analysis in preparation at the time of her death in 1947. In addition to the two papers on sublimation discussed later in this review, the second group contains 'Psycho-Physical Problems revealed in Language: an Examination of Metaphor' (1940), in which the evolution of metaphor is related to the acquisition of control over the bodily orifices, and 'Cautionary Tales' (1943), in which the development of defences against instinctual impulses is related to the child's discovery of real external dangers. The third group contains three papers on Shakespearean criticism and 'Francis Thompson: a Psycho-Analytical Study' (1925).
With the single exception of the paper on Francis Thompson, which is reprinted from the British Journal of Medical Psychology, all the papers have been previously published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Perhaps the most interesting and characteristic is the unfinished paper on Hamlet, which Marjorie Brierley has extracted from the manuscript of a study upon which Ella Sharpe was engaged at the time of her death. This work, which has been provisionally entitled 'The Cyclic Movement in Shakespeare's Plays', was planned as an interpretation of Shakespeare's work in terms of manic-depressive mechanisms. Although what survives is obviously only a small part of what promised to be a m