Morrid Fears And Compulsions. Their Psychology and Psychoanalytic Treatment. By H. W. Frink, M.D., with an introduction by James J. Putnam, M.D. New York,  Moffat, Yard & Co., 1918. Pp.  xxviii-f-568. Price, $4.00.

This is an excellent book and shows well how the psychoanalytic movement is stabilizing and how its principles are being clarified more and more in the literature. Probably no one of the many works that have been published on this subject serves to so clearly and effectively set forth the fundamental principles that are involved in psychoanalysis as they are held by Professor Freud himself. The author for a number of years has been a close student of original sources and shows himself eminently competent to speak. The very admirable illustrations from his own case material add very much to the value of the book and to the elucidation and clarifying of principles. It is exceedingly difficult to understand how critics of this movement of the sort which one usually meets could possibly read this book and if they were able to understand it fail to complete its last page without having stirred within him some comprehension of what psychoanalysis aims at doing, with the necessarily resulting stirrings of sympathy for the work. Dr. Frink has done his work most admirably and stuck to that viewpoint from which Freud has rarely deviated, except of course in his more general works, namely the welfare of the patient. It is the therapeutic approach which reduces psychoanalysis to those simple statements of fact which must ultimately receive their due scientific consideration. There are no theoretical excursions in such work which can be attacked more or less successfully by any one, but a recounting of actual situations, and the way in which they are met in the course of the therapeutic endeavor.

White