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This little book of Professor Janet's is a splendid statement of psychotherapy from his point of view which he has done so much to bring to the fore in a large number of publications over a series of very active years. It is divided into three parts: the first of which contains an historical summary and a criticism of many methods, both of the past and present; the second deals with the question of principles; and the third with the results of psychotherapy.
It is not necessary to undertake a definition of Professor Janet's position in the psychotherapeutic field; that is well known and already well defined, and is assumed in the present volume. It may be said that his theory of psychic tension and of depression with its three stages of sadness, laziness, and aboulia, which he brought out in his introduction to the last edition of his Major Symptoms of Hysteria, reviewed in THE PSYCHOANALYTIC REVIEW, Volume VIII, page 222, are referred to constantly in the pages of the present volume. While Professor Janet's language is still that of the academician, it should not be too critically viewed from this standpoint, as the limitations of language are difficult to overcome. He is thinking in terms of psychic force and its distribution. By“force” he understands“only the expression of a possibility of action” (p. 215). From this point of view his use of the term is quite clear. He deals with this force rather as quantity, and when quality is involved in general terms that leave much to be desired as to the individual components from the psychoanalytic point of view.
In discussing questions of the results of psychotherapy he has nothing to say about what the psyclioanalysts understand by transference. If the internist, in discussing various chemical and physical therapies is blind to the psychological (psychotherapeutic) component, it may be said that Janet seems to be equally blind to the part that the physician plays as a personality. In other words, the dynamics of the trans