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This small volume was first published in Life magazine and presumably seen by millions of readers. Polychromatic pages revealed a new science unobtrusively guiding our daily decisions, and described this latter-day guardian angel with a minimum of sensationalism or errors. To a psychoanalyst, the most admirable section of the book is that on psychology, on testing as used in the armed forces, in industry, and in schools, and on motivational research. Yet in his chapters, the A B C of Psychoanalysis and Does Psychoanalysis Work?, the author presents the id, the ego, the superego, the Oedipal situation, free association, transference, resistance, and working through in terms so simple that the Life reader could grasp his meaning with scanty mental effort. However, when the Life reader has done so, the words will be as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals to him unless they arouse some twinge of anxiety or solve some painful puzzle.
The author sympathetically portrays the economic stresses and occupational hazards of the analyst as he rescues him from the distortions of novelist and playwright, making him appear less like Dr. Faustus and more like Mr. Babbitt. Apologetically, the author mentions some of Freud's errors in fact and judgment. These are, of course, no gauges of the therapeutic value of analysis but the Life reader, trained in accuracy by railroad timetables and verniers, would not understand this. Modest appraisals by analysts of their results are quoted. Suitable and accurate as their statements are in the scientific and conservative milieu of an analytic institute, they appear pitiful when printed on the same page as the emphatic praises of a huckster shouting his wares to the Life reader.