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Dr. Dracoulidès, a Greek psychoanalyst educated in France, discusses not only the creative expression of individual artists but also modern literary, æsthetic, and philosophic movements. He undertakes to interpret the unconscious motivations of Symbolism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Existentialism, and other similar movements. He quotes at length from both analytic and nonanalytic sources concerning the creative process and the lives of the artists.
Those with analytic training or background will find the author's interpretations of artistic motivation too simple to be satisfactory, while artists, critics of æsthetics, and the general public will be irritated by his prejudiced and narrow judgments of all modern artistic developments. Consider for instance Dr. Dracoulidès's estimate of Existentialism: "The two pivotal, though mutually contradictory, tenets of Existentialism are absolute freedom and absolute responsibility; these, we may be sure, represent in psychoanalytic terms the Oedipal revolt against the father'.
Dr. Dracoulidès writes in no uncertain terms of the effect of analysis upon the creative expression of the artist: 'The poet or novelist who after submitting to a therapeutic analysis continued to produce subjective works of real artistic value would thereby