Psychoanalysis and Moral Values: By Heinz Hartmann, M.D. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1960. 121 pp.

This little book, an expanded version of the author's Freud Anniversary Lecture given at the New York Academy of Medicine, deals in a highly condensed way with an amazing number of the theoretical and practical problems posed by psychoanalytic consideration of the moral aspects of behavior. Dr. Hartmann addresses himself to psychoanalysts and for that reason the contributions of psychoanalysis to the understanding of moral development and its disturbances are only summarily dealt with. Readers little familiar with psychoanalytic thinking will not get much enlightenment from this essay. Since the author expresses regret for the incompleteness and sketchy character of his contribution and asks his readers to accept it as a prolegomenon to future developments, this reviewer feels invited to suggest some observations that deserve attention in a more complete work.

Hartmann's point of departure is the contention that a systematic psychology of 'moral behavior', including the genetic aspect, hardly existed before Freud. He emphasizes that this approach does not deal with the 'essence' of 'good' and 'bad' or 'virtue' and 'vice', but with the attitudes, feelings, judgments, and actions that are actually viewed as morally good or bad or that determine what view is taken. The question of what one ought to consider good or bad remains outside the limits of the author's presentation. He points out that moral values cannot be called either 'true' or 'false' as can statements of fact. Science cannot decide what aims one 'ought' to strive for, what values should be considered supreme, and we must accept the difference between normative statements on the one hand and descriptive and theoretical statements on the other. If the assumption is correct that 'true' and 'false', as used in science, cannot be applied to moral values, it does not follow, Hartmann says, that our moral codes have of necessity the character of 'arbitrariness'. To support this view the author refers to