A London Commentary on Phyllis Greenacre's “The Predisposition to Anxiety”

It is inevitable that the ideas of substantial men or women of a previous time will be subjected to critical verdict. Sometimes these verdicts assume that the writers should have been more aware of subsequent discoveries or facts that we now take for granted. Yet it can be unwise to reply that hindsight is a wonderful thing. These kinds of rejoinders inevitably sound defensive or clichéd, and the irony barely registers. Omniscient opinions, full of the confidence that comes with a lack of historical imagination, will nearly always strike a stronger note.

Yet this is not the only possibility when we have the opportunity to revisit some important classic. We may equally be surprised by the depth of the questioning, by the modernity of the possibilities raised, by the fact that whatever the advances may have been we continue to lack exact answers to many of the questions raised. We may be led to conclude that there has not been as much progress as we had thought, or that in some way the quality of modern inquiry has been overestimated. The risk here is that this may cause us to idolize the work or the writer, placing either beyond the reach and usefulness of critical examination.