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The third of these 'études philosophiques à la lumière de la psychanalyse', translated by John Rodker, was published last year in this JOURNAL with the title 'Some Biophysical Aspects of Sadomasochism'. In this essay, the author quotes and examines in detail Freud's successive views on sadism and masochism, and compares them with those of the Marquis de Sade. She makes a bold attempt to integrate clinical experience, metapsychology, biological hypotheses, and cultural manifestations into a comprehensive theory in a paper occupying only 11 pages. Readers will no doubt differ in their opinions of the result, but none can fail to admire the author's courage, her learning, her thoroughness, her integrity, and her eloquence In all three of these essays her thought ranges far and probes deeply, and her expression is often concise. Her writing demands concentration, and it is difficult to do it justice in a short review. It is to be hoped that the two important studies on 'The Unconscious and Time' and 'The Essential Ambivalence of Eros' will soon be published in a form accessible to a wide public. They are of even broader scope than the paper on sado-masochism, and they deal with matters of the greatest human interest in a way the intelligent general reader should be well able to appreciate.
These studies are philosophical in the sense that they deal with problems which have exercised philosophers for many hundreds of years. They are not philosophical in the technical sense. The author is familiar with the work of eminent thinkers such as Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Smuts, and discusses critically some aspects of their thought. Her chief concern is to turn the light of psycho-analysis upon the ideas of such thinkers, and to seek indirect illumination of psycho-analytic problems in their works. Such comparative and integrative effort is none too common in contemporary psychological writing, and it is at once stimulating and enlarging to the