Many persons are interested today in the question, what motivates the study of medicine and of psychoanalysis. The contributors to this volume, however, clearly do not know why they became doctors. Their free associations—more or less—might have been informative, but their 'reasons' are almost meaningless rationalizations. The book reads as if the fifty colleagues were called to a quiet fish pond and asked to throw pebbles into it: the waves and ripples form patterns and readers may spend a few hours watching them in delighted contemplation: but the question remains unanswered