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No doubt there is a field for popular medicine, that is, medical articles written for the lay public. Certain hygienic and prophylactic facts can doubtless be disseminated through the daily press with benefit, although perhaps the same information could be dispensed more certainly in other ways. But one objection to the method is that the type of mind which finds its pabulum in special newspaper articles is not particularly likely to find any attraction in the quiet and logical presentation of medical facts. Thus, an article on fresh air would be passed carelessly by, but the miraculous rejuvenation of an ancient Don Juan by goat glands is eagerly read by the multitudes. And of course medicine does not progress by chamois-like leaps from peak to peak, but by a slow and painful ascent, halting here and there, retracing the path and even abandoning it altogether to seek a fresh one.
It has long been recognized that too much knowledge of his own pathological processes is likely to focus a patient's attention upon himself and actually retard his recovery. True as this is in general medicine, it is almost an axiom in. mental medicine, especially in psychoanalysis. We have all had experience with the patient who comes to the analyst, conversant with all the literature of the subject, who compares mentally his recollection of the authorities he has read with what he is told. Much literature has sprung up, apparently intended for such persons.
Dr. Tridon possesses to an admirable degree the faculty for taking the work of other men and expressing it in simple terms. Thus in the present volume he has mixed together Freud, Jung, Adler, and Kempf, and reduced the result to fluent journalese. He has thus produced a primer of psychoanalysis that will no doubt decorate the library tables in many an inland Greenwich Village.
Tridon is essentially a showman. In a fluent, easy style he exhibits a few sleight of hand tricks of analysis, just enough to whet the appetite, and then invites