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The editors of this book in a remarkably tactless foreword scold their contributors for not knowing what to talk about or how to discuss it. They may be right, but they are certainly ungrateful. While Freud was alive, the prospect of a reply from him could elevate his critics beyond their ordinary capabilities. Now even the passions have subsided. Each 'current approach' squats in its own institute, fulfilling some need or another. Robert Waelder in the opening article wisely limits his description of psychoanalysis to one printed page, for what more can one say to people who are resolved to be dogmatic?
In the second paper Rado prefers to scrap Freud's instinct theory and quotes Freud's comment, 'this is our mythology', not only as an admission, which of course it is, but as damaging, which it is not. For Freud not only pointed to the danger, but out of all the complex phenomena that could not yet be phrased more rationally he then forged his structural theory, without which human psychology could only be described but not understood. Rado's system is characterized more by what it omits than by what it asserts, and consequently relies upon the charity of psychoanalysts who are willing to translate him into the freudian sense that he professes to discard. To some newly-arrived scientist with an open but uninformed mind, Rado's term 'emergency control' would only be a form of lip smacking until there had been supplied— a mental agency for experiencing emergency where and when it has not been experienced before, and where other people have registered no emergency; a differentiating factor in that mental agency sufficient to explain changing reactions to one type of already established emergency, or the persistence of one reaction in a seeming diversity of situations; the forces operating in or upon that agency which differentiate emergency from ease, both with and without any apparent external cause, and a reason why these modalities differ from time to time as