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Scrutiny of the bibliographies in recent volumes of psychoanalytic journals reveals the not very surprising fact that almost all contain references to one or more papers by Freud. That this observation is “not very surprising” is in itself surprising. What current scientific journal in another discipline would include references to work done almost a century earlier? The added fact that these references are not merely ritualistic—the Freud references are relevant to the present-day clinical and theoretical concerns of the authors—is either a tribute to the power of the Freudian paradigm, and therefore to Freud himself, or to its sterility. Skeptics, of course, will see these bibliographic facts as evidence of an excessive idealization of Freud and a religious retention of his ideas.
These musings were stimulated by the book before us. Victor Tausk, a psychoanalytic pioneer, wrote the papers contained therein during the second decade of this century. Can it be that these papers are still of interest? Of the twelve, eight had been previously available to English-speaking (and reading) students of psychoanalysis in various major psychoanalytic journals. Of those eight, three published in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1969 appeared through the efforts of the editor of this book, Paul Roazen. Only the most determined will have read all of them. We are therefore in Roazen's debt for his persistence in bringing the previously published and four new English translations together in one book. Tausk's work can now be studied as an entity and considered for its scientific and historical relevance.
That work is not, however, a seamless entity. The papers touch on diverse subjects ranging from speculative philosophical discourse to masturbation, premature ejaculation, psychiatric experience