Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. By Dr. Sigmund Freud,, LLD. Authorized English edition with introduction by A. A. Brill, Moffat, Yard & Company, New York.

We are again indebted to Dr. Brill for another translation of one of Professor Freud's works. Dr. Brill has already given us in English a most excellent digest of the theory of wit elaborated by Professor Freud in this volume, but it is with no less satisfaction that the original volume in all its completeness comes to our desk. It is needless to say that it is a distinct addition to the psychoanalytical portion of our libraries, and as in all other of Professor Freud's writings it bears the stamp of his genius.

So much has already been written about this subject apropos of this particular exposition of it, especially Dr. Brill's abstract of it some time ago, that it seems hardly necessary to review in detail the theories set forth, in fact it would be quite difficult, even impossible, to do so within the limits of a book review. The principal reason for this is that the theories developed are slowly elaborated and constructively built up by the detailed examination of evidence. The book proceeds just as the author has thought it out, and therefore there is a mass of material hardly appropriate for review but wonderfully helpful to the reader who can follow along in the path that the author prepares for him. Suffice it to say that the work is divided into three parts — the analysis of wit, the synthesis of wit, and the theories of wit — and after some nearly four hundred pages of a most admirable and illuminating exposition of these subjects the author sums up his conclusions in the following terse formulae: The pleasure of wit originates from economy of expenditure in inhibition; the pleasure of the comic results from an economy of expenditure in thought, while the pleasure of humor comes from an economy of expenditure in feeling.

To the reviewer one of the most stimulating features of this remarkable work is the way in which the author constantly reduces the psychic phenomena to terms of energy, and explains the pleasure resulting in wit, comic and humor in terms of