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From and content of this small volume are in complete harmony. Under its modest title we find the informal causeries of a wise and scholarly man, mature in his knowledge of life and the human soul. However these are not the only qualities deserving praise. We find here a booklet not only brilliantly written, amusing and instructive at the same time, but also the continuation of what might be called the life work of the author: the creating of models for the application of psychoanalysis.
This last appears to us to be important enough to warrant detailed consideration. Analysis itself may in principle be applied to the social sciences in two ways. The first is the well-known method established by Freud and continued by others. This consists in using psychoanalysis as an instrument for the study of problems which—in whatever realm they lie, that of ethnology, history, sociology, æsthetics, etc.—remain psychological problems. The titles which Freud chooses for his monographs show this very clearly by the delimitation expressed in them: Der Witz und seine. Beziehung zum Unbewussten, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, etc. A discussion which appears in Imago on the question why a famous poet jilted his early love would therefore of necessity be expected to select from the whole topic the psychological motivation of this step, and to examine it from a psychoanalytic angle.
For the purpose of establishing the second of the two fundamentally possible applications of psychoanalytic knowledge to social sciences, let us imagine for a moment that the person who is to make use of this knowledge is not an analyst but a specialist in the particular field of social science in question. Let us suppose, for example, that an historian has to write the biography of a Roman emperor—a modern portrait wrought in the incomparable style of Plutarch. Aside from the purely historical aspects of the particular epoch, such an historian will necessarily have to study at l