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As one picks up this book for the first time the chances are that the question will immediately occur to him: Why did the author pick out just these three personalities—Franz Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, and Sigmund Freud—to present in his trilogy of mental healers? But when one has read the book he no longer asks the question, for its answer would have no significance. The book is so thoroughly satisfying that the question of choice of personalities by the author rapidly passes out of the picture as one peruses the pages.
We have here three thrilling biographies, splendidly and powerfully presented in the way biographies ought to be written,—not primarily for the purpose of criticizing the lives of the individuals concerned, showing where they were wrong, how they might have and should have avoided mistakes, and in general turning up one's nose at their accomplishments,— but for the purpose of understanding the personalities concerned, and the author has done a splendid job in this respect.
We no longer see Mesmer as the elegant charlatan, catering to the aristocrats of the French court, but as the earnest delver after truths, impelled by a curiosity that gives him no rest, rising to the heights of social and intellectual prominence, and then sinking to the depths, being expelled from his native city, and then finally, only too late, being invited to return when the infirmities of age have robbed such a return of the glamorous prospects it would have had in youth and when he has established intimate connections with a group of patients in the practice of his profession who depend upon him and who in turn he feels bound to serve.
The biography of Mary Baker Eddy is perhaps the most compelling of the three. It depicts a poor, unlettered, neurotic woman, with an iron determination, an inflexibility of will and a direction of purpose that is incapable of being swerved. She does not find her metier until she is fifty years of age, and then she pursues it with an indefatigabili