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This is another popular presentation of psychoanalysis—in the reviewer's opinion an excellent one. Its pages give evidence of a thorough grasp of psychoanalytic literature which is well organized and presented simply and concisely. The only exceptions are certain parts of the section on theory which at times become a trifle discursive.
The peculiar merit of the book is the unusual vividness, even plasticity of the author's presentation. It is an extremely personal product, the end result of the author's own process of assimilation during the course of his psychoanalytic training and experience. This gives his work a freshness in point of view which is difficult to achieve in a book that is primarily a summary of the work of others, and the author is able to communicate to an unusual degree the sense of conviction that can be derived only from direct personal experience. On the other hand, the personal orientation of the presentation occasionally betrays the writer into burdening his case fragments with a mass of detailed associations that are of interest only to a trained psychoanalyst and must be confusing to a general reader.
Of the four parts of the book, the section on facts (Part 1) and that on therapy (Part 3) are the best. The chapter on the Structure of the Total Personality (Chapter 6) is not so well organized as the rest of the book and leaves a somewhat confusing impression. It seems somewhat confusing also to divide instincts into three groups, "ego instincts", "destructive instincts", and "sexual instincts", as is done at the end of Chapter 4; and to state in two places (pp. 122