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This volume, containing nineteen essays in honor of Karl A. Menninger, begins with a brief biography, "Introduction: A Renaissance Man of Psychiatry," by Sydney Smith. In it, the influence of Dr. Karl's parents, his teacher Southard, and his analyst Franz Alexander are delineated, as is the meteoric success which followed the publication of his first book, The Human Mind.
Herbert J. Schlesinger's interesting clinical article, "Developmental and Regressive Aspects of the Making and Breaking of Promises," traces the progression from what he refers to as the stage of primary promising, in which the act of promising is regarded by the child as complete in itself, to the mature achievement of secondary promising, in which the promise is a prelude to a later act of fulfillment. He sees children's promises as "propitiary tales" couched in the future tense but intended to correct past misdemeanors and to assuage the resulting alienation from the parents.
Robert R. Holt's contribution, "Ideological and Thematic Conflicts in the Structure of Freud's Thought," continues the author's studies of Freud's cognitive style. Holt describes a series of intellectual and ideological conflicts in Freud's work, which he traces back to the influence of the conflicting cultural and scientific trends of the nineteenth century. Holt divides the contradictory doctrines and disciplines he enumerates into a "soft" side concerned with speculative and intrapsychic matters and a "hard" one imbued with the inductive reasoning of the exact sciences.
Holt speculates that the "hard" side stood for paternal authority to Freud, whereas the "soft" side came to represent the comforting embrace of the mother. He infers from this that Freud was struggling with the construction of a stable sexual identity and goes on to hypothesize that Freud's mental makeup allowed him to delay synthesis and to tolerate contradictions, thereby enabling him to be exceptionally creative. Holt finds the resolution to the co