The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud: Translated and edited, with introduction by Dr. A. A. Brill. New York: The Modern Library, 1938. 977 pp.

This volume in the series of Modern Library giants is a reprint of some of the most important contributions of the founder of psychoanalysis. Its appearance is however of more significance than that of a reprint. The last footnote in A. A. Brill's comprehensive introduction to this volume reads: 'Alas! As these pages are going to the printer we have been startled by the terrible news that the Nazi holocaust has suddenly encircled Vienna and that Professor Freud and his family are virtual prisoners in the hands of civilization's greatest scourge.' The publication of the book thus coincided with Freud's abandonment of the city in which psychoanalysis was conceived, born, reared and brought up to adulthood. The twelve volumes of Freud's collected works together with many other valuable contributions to psychoanalytic literature were put under lock and key by the new masters of Austria; it is not a protective lock and key. The few copies of these works on the shelves of libraries thus automatically become a bibliographical rarity. The present day chieftains of German civilization are by far more thorough than their forerunners. There is no enlightened Prince William von Jülich-Cleve-Berg in the Germany of today. Prince William protected Weyer and saved his writing for posterity. One wonders whether the future historian, looking back upon the destruction of the Alexandrian library, will not compare it favorably with the destruction of cultural values by the self-appointed wizards of the Aryan torch of today; or perhaps it will be the happy lot of the descendants of these very wizards to restore the lost remnants of the conflagration just as the descendants of the Alexandrian invaders brought back to Europe six centuries later the long lost Aristotle.

Under the circumstances one cannot escape being keenly aware of the contrast between the events in Vienna and the contemporaneous