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Caruso has collected and organized in a single volume certain of his ideas regarding the theory and practice of psychoanalysis which were originally introduced in essays appearing in various journals over the preceding decade. The result purports to be a critical study of the fundamental concepts of depth psychology, and their clinical application, but develops rather into an exhortation to psychotherapists that they aim for a 'new synthesis' of man which restores to him his lost spiritual and transcendental values, ushering him thus into the state of grace without which psychological treatment must end in frustration, failure, and futility. While praising Freud for revolutionizing the psychological study of man, the author decries the absence of spiritual and philosophical considerations in the structure and practice of classical psychoanalysis, and considers it a serious therapeutic shortcoming. It offers man, he maintains, little more than the philosophy of nihilism and the desperation of the existentialists.
Though presented as a scientific treatise, this work is really no more than a religio-philosophical tract in which arguments are bolstered by psychoanalytic concepts, neither understood nor scientifically applied to psychopathology. Its explicit thesis asserts that man finds himself in his present crisis of disruption because he has lost his faith, and that it is his fall from grace that has made psychotherapy so necessary today. The implicit thesis holds that a truly objective science of psychology is impossible; that the only psychological truth is that which serves revelation. Humanism is made the scapegoat for man's plight since it is a manifestation of his arrogance. The author seems quite oblivious to the fact that were it not for the