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This is a peculiar, if also peculiarly brilliant, book. In it Alexander Grinstein continues his effort to reconstruct Freud's psyche at the beginning of psychoanalysis, teasing out the relationship between Freud's personal issues and his psychoanalytic ideas. The core of Grinstein's current study is “Freud's ‘little essay’ on The Judge…included as a part of his letter to Wilhelm Fliess on June 20, 1898,” and generally “regarded as Freud's first attempt to apply psychoanalysis to a literary work” (p. 277). Grinstein dissects this essay, on the story in which Meyer “reached the zenith of his personal revelations” (p. 294), in chapter 14. The previous 13 chapters are devoted to Grinstein's own psychoanalysis of the content of the works Meyer wrote before he wrote The Judge, although not without comment on the reasons Freud was interested in some of them. The next two chapters deal with the stories Meyer wrote subsequent to The Judge, concluding Grinstein's psychoanalysis of his works. It is only in the last chapter (17) that Grinstein concentrates more or less entirely on Freud's relationship to Meyer.
Thus, the book is lopsided in structure; it is essentially an extended scholarly exercise—very detailed, very precise—in Grinstein's psychoanalysis of virtually every last piece of Meyer's writings. In my opinion, Freud's interest in Meyer takes second place, although that place is exhaustively and suggestively examined. Indeed, Freud's essay sometimes seems to be little more than an excuse for Grinstein to show his own applied psychoanalytic prowess, which seems to subsume, at least in thoroughness and even subtlety, that of Freud. In fact, Freud's essay lays a comparatively heavy psychological hand on Meyer's story, while Grinstein's chapters deal with Meyer's various stories in a somewhat more nuanced way.