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There is little good to be said about this book, which reveals more intellectual and conceptual confusion than clarity and order. There is much good to be said about its author, who as an analyst is an example of the man who tried hard and failed.
By profession a psychologist, Dr. Næsg·ard has had very little training as a psychoanalyst. He became interested in Freud around 1915. The interest grew and became a fascination. For many years he has practiced psychoanalysis in Copenhagen. For many years one of the very few persons in Denmark who dared take Freud seriously, he was a courageous pioneer in psychoanalysis. Ridiculed and persecuted by an arrogant, ignorant, though at times extremely witty and hard-hitting press, Næsg·ard fought his long and hopeless battle. Stubbornly he refused to capitulate and in the process he became a very narcissistic man. In 1929 and 1933 he published two books, which were on the whole sober and objective presentations of Freud's findings and theories.
This volume, however, demonstrates how impossible it is for a person without thorough psychoanalytic training to maintain that emotional and intellectual self-discipline which alone makes it possible to function as an analyst or to apply psychoanalytic understanding to problems of human nature. The good analyst is 'tough-minded and tenderhearted' to use Oliver Allston's (Van Wyck Brooks's) words; i.e., he has integrity of character and can establish mature object relationships. It is a sad fact that circumstances did not permit Dr. Næsg·ard's talent and courage to achieve that final maturity.
A great deal of attention is paid in this book to Næsg·ard's instinct theory, which he developed in an earlier book: Kend dig selv1 (1941). This theory does not lack originality. According to it there are altogether approximately thirty instincts, among them anxiety, pain, shame, fatigue, fainting and happiness. This makes for sad reading because it exemplifies the typical tragedy in the