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This is a pleasing set of biographies. They do not aim at narrating the detailed events that occurred in the lives of those studied, but rather at presenting portraits of character. And this is, after all, the more important aim, for the point of a careful chronography should be in the end to lead up to this. Dr. Hitschmann's portraits are ably sketched, and the essays pleasantly written.
It would seem that the author used psycho-analysis not so much as a method as an approach. He has thus gained an intimate intuitive grasp of his characters, which has enabled him to write essays informed by analysis and given him a discerning eye for the significant and also to preserve a balanced understanding of motive.
This sets out all that the biographies were intended to be. Hitschmann was a pioneer in psycho-analytic autobiography, and it is interesting to see in his writing how analysis may aid the discernment of the biographer.
Those who may look for psycho-analytic explanations of the characters, aetiologies, or diagnoses will be looking for something that is not there. For instance, it is astonishing to find how often repeated among the great men studied is plain sexual inhibition towards women of their own kind, from Goethe to Johnson; but Hitschmann does not permit himself to suggest reasons for this. Nor does he venture more than to attribute Schopenhauer's condition to disappointment at the loss of his mother's love, contempt for her dissolute life, and being hampered by his father's harshness. This is indeed a good example of the way Hitschmann uses analysis to guide him in selecting what is significant, without seeking to explain why these attitudes should have had such dire and peculiar effects.
The longest and fullest of all the essays is that on Schopenhauer. This was the first analysis, not of a philosopher, but of a philosopher's philosophical ideas, ever to have been carried out. And Hitschmann interprets many details of the philosophy, though without a