You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a devastating criticism of some legal concepts and legal thinking in general. The author has delved into psychoanalytic literature and comes to his subject convinced that these newer psychological points of view have much to offer in the way of interpreting legal thought. Mr. Frank is firmly of the belief that the eternal search for stability, security, and certainty in the law is the hang-over of a childish attitude of mind which had its original inception in the faith of the child in the like attributes of its father, and that later in life, when the father is lost in one way or another, the child still seeks this same security in other ways. The quest for a law which will be absolutistic in character is the remnant of this child need. Mr. Frank has a great deal to say about the errors into which this way of thinking has led the legal mind and a good many examples to show how it has led it astray, and he therefore reaches the conclusion, which it seems to the reviewer does not necessarily follow, that this direction of thought, the moving toward such an objective, even though it may never be reached, is in itself wrong. It would seem that a conscious effort to attain the absolute would take the man further and further away from childish things, and that the direction might be right and that the examples merely indicate failures by the way, which failures