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This new volume in the Argentine Biblioteca de Psicoanálisis logically follows Garma's three previous, more or less elementary, works, in that it focuses upon certain aspects of aggression, whether internally or externally directed. The subject matter is divided into sections on war, suicide and the obsessive neurosis, followed by a quasi postscript psychography of the imagist poet, Arthur Rimbaud. There is thus an appeal to various groups of readers: to those interested in the psychology of social phenomena, to the clinician, and to a larger 'cultured' lay public.
Garma's choice of war as the introductory topic is didactically a happy one, for it makes plausible, as nothing else could, the view of Freud in his letter to Einstein. The rather lengthy section on suicide provides the author an easy phenomenon—illustrated by a wealth of material from clinical practice and belles lettres—on which to demonstrate the mechanisms discovered by Freud and others. His treatment is original in emphasizing more than most treatises on the subject, the aim of regaining the love object in the 'beyond'. The relevant mechanisms are clearly set forth in several diagrams. On the other hand the phenomenon of introjection and its attendant effects is rather underplayed.
By this time the reader is prepared to understand the rôle of sadism and masochism, and the defenses against them, in the obsessive neurosis. The straightforward method which Garma employs in the exposition of this neurosis has the merit of logical development, and judged from this point of view, it is successful. A more historical presentation might have lacked all the lucidity which Garma displays; yet it might have revealed why Freud stated that this 'most interesting and grateful subject of analytic investigation' is 'a problem still unsolved'.
The study of Rimbaud, the brilliant young psychopath, whose career as a poet was so precocious, so sensational and so brief, furnishes ample evidence of the rôle of murder