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By no one is a discussion of the problem of the death instinct more appreciated than the reviewer, and for this reason the present volume was eagerly and hopefully read. It is the more disappointing, therefore, to be obliged to report that the book contributes nothing to the understanding of either the life or the death instinct, renamed by the author the 'Vita' and the 'Fatum'.
The two page introduction is stimulating and promising. Nothing thereafter lives up to the promise. What is not dull and platitudinous ('Virtue, then, is the social law' … 'Spices stimulate—they seem to vitalize …') is incredibly naïve. This naïveté is not only of style but of content. For example, he asks if the baby sucking at the breast is 'acting through the drive of sexuality or of self-preservation, or … both …', and his commentary is, 'An analyst might scratch his head in perplexity'.
It is only fair to add that here and there one finds some evidence that the author has some understanding of parts of psychoanalytic theory, but he is much more interested in philosophizing in a rambling way about some renamed concepts.
Chapter eleven is an appendix, one-half a page long, in which the author lists the 'etiological factors in the formation of the criminoses'. What this has to do with the rest of the book is beyond the reviewer. None of the standard contributions by psychoanalysts to the etiology of criminality are referred to in the bibliography.