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The academic world has recently provided psychoanalysis with a series of contributions from other specialities that can only be beneficial. We have heard from Peter Gay at Yale, Patrick Mahony at l'Université de Montréal, Leon Edel at New York University and Hawaii, and now Steven Marcus, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. The subtitle of the book contains its very gist: “Studies in the Transition from Victorian Humanism to Modernity.”
Marcus has been able to review, and present in condensed form, almost the entire corpus of Freud's oeuvre. This he relates to the culture of the Victorian epoch to show the influence of the latter on psychoanalytic theory and to reveal how it produced the kinds of patients that Freud saw. The patients of Freud's most active period were very different from those seen by the analysts of today. The alteration of clinical pictures into the narcissistic and borderline personalities so prominent today is also determined in Marcus's view by the simultaneous evolution of Western culture. All of this is presented in delightful perspicuity by a charming, and even very humorous writer.
Marcus is the master of language one would expect him to be, so that reading his book is an aesthetic delight. He is, moreover, no dry musty person in an ivory tower. He is also a pundit of modern slang and the vernacular, and he does not hesitate to use it. He must have obtained this capability from the best of teachers, namely, young college students of today. It is from such experts that this reviewer