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The sight of one's own words in print is often a pleasing experience. There, in the accepted symbols of his time and culture, is something stamped, the writer hopes, with his personal imprint for all to see. If he succeed in writing what seems to be a new idea, his pleasure is even deeper.
Mr. Reik uses the time-worn formula of the psychoanalyst interpreting art. In the course of revealing the freudian implications that lurk under every bush in the landscapes of Shakespeare, Goethe, and others, we are treated to most intimate disclosures of the way the mind of 'the analyst' behaves. Whether the author is beset, as J. C. Powys says, 'with the frantic demon of exhibitionism' we can but speculate. When an author takes his reader's time to say, 'Being on vacation and without my library, I cannot determine when Freud's paper was published and when The Lonely Way was written, but these data are unimportant, since Freud and Schnitzler both lived in Vienna and it is very likely that the writer also knew that young physician', one wonders at least if he is not becoming elated with the sound of his own words. Perhaps we analysts are all somewhat susceptible to this pleasing intoxication, since our métier requires us to sit silently for such long stretches.
The author has, indeed, an impressive cultural background and a fluent ability to talk about it. Lay readers may find pleasure in having works of art anatomized for them, but this reviewer wonders if such treatment is not merely another way of 'dissecting the nightingale for the secret of his song'. The book, as a whole, is a chatty, conversational collection of obiter dicta all of which, apparently, the author considers charming and entertaining enough to warrant presentation to the general public.