Studies on Hysteria: By Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German and edited by James and Alix Strachey. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1957. 335 pp.

Of not many books can it be said with assurance that they bear the stamp of immortality. This new translation by James and Alix Strachey of Freud's Studien über Hysterie (originally published in Vienna in 1895) belongs to this imperishable category. Read in conjunction with the volume of his letters to Fliess (The Origins of Psychoanalysis, English translation, 1954), it gives the reader an account of the invention of what the editors justly describe as 'the first instrument for the scientific examination of the human mind'. Here indeed is psychological history in the making. Before our eyes, concepts that are nowadays almost household properties are given birth or adumbrated in prodigal sequence: repression, the unconscious, the beginnings of free association and of the interpretation of dreams, conversion, cathexis, overdetermination, censorship, the transference, defense, resistance, and the principle of constancy which underlies every dynamic psychology worth the name. To which list Breuer adds trauma, catharsis, abreaction, and many other concepts, including that of the determining force in conversion of the original hypnoid state—a theory which Freud later discarded completely. Equally intriguing is the fact that Breuer, who was later to abjure this conviction, lays more emphasis in his contributions on the sexual factor in hysterical pathogenesis than does Freud, who very soon after the publication of these studies was to raise it to the status of a cardinal agent. Even more fascinating is the insight these papers give into Freud's unique combination of therapeutic and theoretical intuition, which, re-enforced by the patent courage of his convictions in the face of unforeseeable obstacles, gave rise to the monumental structure and endless range of his psychoanalytic theories. Modern students of theory who are prone to think that the basic principles of psychoanalysis have been greatly extended in recent years should make a point of reading this and o