Die Psychoanalyse Als Methode: By Imre Hermann. (Cologne and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2nd revised edition 1963. Pp. 139.)

Professor Meng, in his introduction, warmly recommends the study of this weighty book. It aims at presenting psycho-analysis as a method of scientific investigation and compares this method with that of other sciences. It would be hard to translate Hermann's book from the original German into English. The cultural and temperamental difference between British and German ways of communicating abstract thought is quite striking. Every sentence is packed with meaning and takes some effort to unpack! The question whether a book originally written in 1934 is still valid in 1963 can be answered in the affirmative. In fact this is not only a new edition, but largely an up-to-date book with the points of view of many authors on current theory. Hermann devotes several chapters to the presentation of the roots of our method, as they were planted by Freud and his first adherents.

The book is not an easy one to read and I must confess to having had to read it several times owing to the very condensed way of thinking which seems to come easily to the author. However, there are also passages when he writes in that simple language so dear to the