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The Twelfth Volume of Freud's monumental Gesammelte Schriften was issued at the time when the XIII International Psychoanalytic Congress was held in Lucerne. In form, type, and general composition this volume is similar to the eleven volumes already issued, and like its older siblings it is not devoid of some regrettable lapses which are in unpleasant disharmony with the solidity and the general excellence of the whole edition. Thus Freud's Foreword to a special number on Psychopathology edited by Dorian Feigenbaum is credited to The Psychoanalytic Review, and a general index is still lacking. One is, of course, not unmindful of the enormous task which the preparation of such an index represents, but the one who undertakes it will perform a lasting service to the students of psychoanalysis.
The Twelfth Volume embraces all that Freud has written between 1928 and 1933, and it stands out as an encouraging reminder of scientific consistence and persistence in our modern dark age when the writings of Freud and of many of his gifted contemporaries were burned in the fire of our modern auto-da-fè in Germany. Der Familienroman der Neurotiker, which was first published in 1909 in Otto Rank's Myth of the Birth of a Hero and Freud's article on Psychoanalysis (1926), published in the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, are the only two contributions in this volume dated before 1928. A number of forewords to books and some statements and letters of public interest are included, but all the above mentioned writings cover only fifty-three pages out of the four hundred twenty of the volume. The rest—over three hundred sixty pages—are devoted to the following scientific contributions: Dostoyevski and the Murder of the Father; Civilization and its Discontents; the New Series of Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Libidinal Types; On the Sexuality of Women; The Conquest of Fire; Why War? Of the last four, three appeared in full and one in summary in this QUARTERLY