Response to Dr Sanders

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for sending me Dr Sanders's letter in which he states that he thought I had made a serious mistake at the outset and proceeded from that basis to write an unfair and irrelevant review.

When I wrote, mid-way through the review (not at the beginning), that the aim of the first chapter was to demonstrate the clarification of confusion using the psychoanalytical method, I was referring to something written by the author in his preface, and not (as Dr Sanders wrote) the passage on p. 5 which mentions what he proposes to describe in the chapter. In the preface the author writes: ‘Chapter one combines a prologue, giving a brief survey of the ground to be covered, with—as the psychoanalytical process is one of clarifying confusion—an account and discussion of a consultation in which this was unmistakable although not accessible to further work’ (p. xii). I think that this is a statement of an aim.

Even if I had made the error which the author mistakenly attributed to me, I don't see how this would render everything else in the review irrelevant.

I accept the author's criticism that I omitted to discuss the way in which dreams are treated in his work.

Yours sincerely,