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Psychoanalysts have looked forward to this translation of Dr. Odier's
L'Angoisse et la pensée magique, hoping that it would furnish a bridge between Piaget's investigations on the stages of development in children and the observations and theories of psychoanalysis, particularly psychoanalytic ego psychology. In this review, no attempt will be made to give a detailed account of the content of the book, since this was done some years ago in considerable detail in a review of the French edition (This QUARTERLY, XVIII, 1949, pp. 503-508). I shall, rather, attempt to evaluate this book critically as a contribution to psychoanalytic and psychological literature.
The book is written in the style of an impressionistic, philosophical essay, rather than a scientific monograph. In this reside both the strength and the weakness of the work. It makes interesting and thought-provoking reading. But it does not succeed in bridging the gap between the two disciplines. One reason for this appears to be Odier's ignoring of psychoanalytic ego psychology; his knowledge of psychoanalysis seems to be limited to id psychology, with emphasis mostly on the Oedipus complex. To this he welds, rather mechanistically, Piaget's theories of ego development. The resulting 'combined method' of psychological investigation and psychotherapy is based on the oversimplified concept that anxiety produces regression of a sector of the ego to externalism (Odier's term), or infantile realism (Piaget's term), or adualism (the term of the American psychologist, James Baldwin). In this regressed sector, which is dominated by anxiety, the ego will revert to infantile prelogic and magic thinking, while the healthy sector of the ego functions on the adult level of logical thinking. Odier states:
In every clear-cut neurosis, two structures exist in the ego, and each sector is in opposition with the other. We have, then, two antinomic systems whose laws conflict with each other and cannot be coördinated.