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Fifteen psychiatric papers published in various technical journals between 1928 and 1948, and three chapters from the author's book, The Morbid Personality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931) make up this volume. Much of it will be familiar to readers of psychoanalytic journals of the past twenty years.
To republish, without editing, such a series of papers is a bold undertaking. The critical reader inevitably follows the chronology for evidence of change of point of view and the personal development of the author. Such a volume is by no means the equivalent of an autobiography, but this reviewer picks 1939 as a turning point for the author. Of the papers published before this date, only A Note on the Psychology of the Inventor (1934) is of comparable quality to the majority of those produced in 1939 and thereafter.
The first paper, Fetishism in Statu Nascendi (1929), describes a little boy of four who constructed a 'fundamental fantasy of endowing the mother with a penis'. This, the author states, accomplished 'the rejection of the vagina … and with it the vaginal childbirth theory' (p. 20). The child is described as precocious, but even so this seems a tall order for a boy of less than five years. Would it not be adequate to content one's self with the hypothesis that the child rejected the idea of the absence of a penis?
The second paper, The Mantel Symbol (1929), is based upon the assumption that a coat can be regarded as the equivalent of the 'original covering of the body (the first coat), the hair' (p. 25). There are some interesting clinical observations on hair, but the thesis is at best a tour de force.
The other papers published prior to 1939 show similar loose thinking. The author tends to jump on his theoretical horse and ride off in all directions. There is uncritical acceptance of contradictory points of view. Theory is administered by shotgun prescription to forestall possible criticism of incompleteness. There is at times an unfortunate tende