Der Gotteskomplex. Die Geburt Und Die Krise Des Glaubens an Die Allmacht Des Menschen: By Horst E. Richter. Rowohlt Verlag, 1979, Pp. 340. (The God-Complex. The Birth and Crisis of the Illusion of the Omnipotence of Man.)

This book, published in February 1979, received a good deal of attention in the German press. Its author is a German psychoanalyst and a past president of the Deutsche Psychonalytische Vereinigung. the author has written the book under the impact of his return from war service, from having been a prisoner of war, to a destroyed home facing the loss of his family and of many friends. During the war he came into contact with psychoanalysis through a pupil of Viktor von Weizsäcker.

The book is a sincere statement based on personal experience and suffering. It is written in a readable style. Its theme is simple: Man's sense of impotence and helplessness leads to an illusion of omnipotence. The theme is followed through on historical, philosophical and sociological lines.

In the first part of the book he describes Man's breaking out from the fetters of the middle ages; the egocentric philosophical view from Leibnitz to Nietzsche; the utopia of the cure of the damaged individual (Marx, Freud, Marcuse); the flight from the inner world (behaviourism); the subjection of the 'logic of the heart' (Pascal) to the 'logic of the head' (Descartes, Spinoza); splitting off the emotions and the removal of the equality of women (representing the feeling part of man); the submission of the sense of humanity, the interrelation of psychological and social repression; Rousseau—the Romantic, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and psychoanalysis.

The second part deals with the denial of suffering, and in the third part of the book he speaks of the task of overcoming the psychical and social split of the self of Man. (The youth movement as an attempt at self criticism; the liberation of the corrupt love and the circle of life; recognition of death as the condition of the decline of the God-Complex and regaining human balance between the sense of impotence and omnipotence.

In the fourth and final part of the book the author gives the description of an analysis of an individual patient to illustrate