Dreams and Myths. By Dr. Karl Abraham. Translated by Dr. W. A. White. Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, No. 15.  Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., New York. $1.00.

Freud's study of the dream having given us a clear understanding of those complexes lying in the unconscious, which breaking through cause mental disturbances, such a work as this one before us serves to throw further illumination upon such knowledge and understanding. Dr. White has here translated and presented a most important aid to psychoanalytic work.

Abraham reviews succinctly Freud's theories of infantile sexuality and repression, and of the fulfillment in dreams of wishes arising out of the repressed material, through that symbolism which conceals the true wish and its sexual character from the censorship of consciousness. A few typical dreams, he reminds us, appear, as do the œdipus myth and some others, with but little symbolic clothing, for they seem so preposterous that the censor fails to recognize them as containing a wish fulfillment. In general, however, in dream and in myth, a symbolic guise must be pierced before the true content may be understood. Abraham has taken two principal myths, that of Prometheus and the origin of fire, and the closely related myth of the origin of nectar, and subjected these to careful analysis and comparison with the dream. The myth he shows is a racial, psychical product analogous to the dream for the individual. Following the work of Kuhn he traces the Greek legend further back among the Indogermanic peoples where are found the deeper layers of the myth in the earlier infantile phantasies of the race.

The dream contains often an apparent wish beneath which lies the concealed wish that reaches back into infantile sexual material. For the sexual both in the infancy of the individual and of the race is the strongest impulse and therefore receives the strongest repression. It is in this Prometheus saga that we can see these various stages of repression and sublimation and find the several strata of the fulfilled wishes. Comparing the later form with the Vedic myth,