L'Échec De Baudelaire, Étude Psychanalytique: By René Laforgue. Paris: Denoël et Steele. 1931. 239 p.

French neuro-psychiatric traditionalism was naturally quite slow in looking into the earlier pages of Freud; then the war came and broke off any possible intellectual contact with the German speaking countries and as a result the earlier writings of Freud became known to the French reader only some years after the war; as a matter of fact, they began to be published in French approximately at the time when Freud had published Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Thus French psychoanalysis developed under very disadvantageous circumstances: having lagged behind for almost twenty-five years, it naturally lost the advantages of the German and English speaking countries which had time to familiarize themselves with the principles of psychoanalysis and to assimilate them gradually as the system developed step by step. To recapture a quarter of a century of development, and a quite eventful one at that, in less than a decade, is, as far as the general public and the medical profession is concerned, well-nigh impossible; this is particularly true of such a discipline as psychoanalysis, which requires a mass of empirical data, and which more than any other scientific trend of recent times, has aroused so many resistances and so much