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Dr. Sachs once stated that the psychoanalysis of dead men is a fatuous and precarious undertaking; that it is justified only when it concerns a person whose life exerted great influence on his contemporaries, and whose nuclear psychic constellations were so clearly drawn as to be discernable in the broad outlines of his life, or when these constellations present a unique psychological situation. Dr. Sachs's book on Caligula satisfies all these conditions. It deals with a figure whose distortions of character for a time influenced the entire Roman world. In the circumstances of his early life and his relations to Tiberius we have an opportunity to observe the interplay of psychic forces, which, because of the exalted position of the man, produced a characterological monstrosity rarely to be found in nature. Moreover in the life of this man we have the opportunity to study not only the disease of an emperor, but in part a disease of the entire Roman world.
The usual earmarks of biographies of this character are entirely absent. One hears nothing of Caligula's mother or father fixation; there is no effort to fit his character into our modern nosology, nor is there any effort to strain at the known facts of his life to yield dubious but high sounding formulations. The absence of these technical formulations greatly enhances the power of the book. The appeal is made to the reader's unconscious. From the choice of material, the order in which it is presented, and the description of the setting in which it is enacted, it is nevertheless easy to see that this biography is guided by the psychoanalytic conception of human destiny. The book, like the man it describes, moves swiftly and dramatically to an inevitable dénouement.
The book describes a man–Tiberius–who casts a very hideous shadow–Caligula. Whereas both men come in the end to have similar psychopathological traits, the one is a wild caricature of the other. Moreover they both arrive at the same end by diffe