The Re-Creating of The Individual*

The manifold opportunity for originality and diversity of interpretation which psychoanalysis opens to its adherents constitutes both its fascination and its peculiar weakness. A wealth of material touching the deepest sources of human life is revealed; but as to what all this material means we are still without an adequate and final knowledge. To the well-known principles of Freud, Dr. Hinkle proposes to add a wider interpretation patterned somewhat after the Jung school. Accepting the fact that symbols can be traced in part to specific and concrete sexual trends of an infantile level, there is still a wider meaning of the symbol for the life of the individual. The particular symbol employed may be drawn either from the personal unconscious (repressed elements) of the individual mind, or from the collective unconscious out of which the individual by a long process of struggle has achieved a differentiation of his own “psychic functions” and his personality. Dr. Hinkle believes that “unconscious drawings” as well as dreams may be made to show these innately developed symbols of the great forces of nature (e.g., sex and fertility) in terms as universal and old as mankind. These symbols are (she thinks) entirely apart from anything the individual has experienced, and are the undifferentiated products of the collective life of primitive man. Many readers, including the reviewer, cannot accept this sweeping endorsement of innate ideas. Yet it must be admitted that the drawings presented, many of them possessing a mysterious potency and charm, compel more than a passing thought. We need, of course, a thorough associational and genetic study of the mental condition producing these works before we ascribe them to an inherited unconscious mental content. Much of the symbolism denoting birth and regression Dr. Hinkle would carry back to the struggle to free one's self from the great undifferentiated mass of the collective unconscious, which comprises the