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As the reviewer turns the pages of this mixture of sense and nonsense, of borrowed profundities and specious patchwork and comes to the end, the general conclusion is—another Santa Claus to the populace with Christmas tree pop-corn masquerading under the guise of a scientific— “but not technical”—treatise on psychoanalysis.
The authoress has evidently been a lay analyst who in the not far distant past has known Ferenczi—she writes of a long analysis—he died in 1933—and she frequently makes claim to have made “original discoveries” in the science of psychoanalysis—some of them being “improvements”.
It would take us too far afield to turn over the many specious half truths and contradictions which we find in this work, which, were it not for its pretentious claims for special wisdom we would consign to the trash-basket unmentioned.
People get ill according to their “Disposition”, we are told. To prove this only a part of the old Pettenkofer story is pulled out. The medical conception of constitution is totally foreign to the author's stock of ideas. The Freudian concept of the “will to be ill” is here served up en escallop. We are informed that the “relative amount of disease is far higher in humans than in animals”. Whence this Jehovistic knowledge? Throughout the book we have similar glimpses of popular buncomb, on a par with the myths about the “healthy Indians” and similar fairy tales.
Although ostensibly writing about psychoanalysis the Ego is made the equivalent of the total personality, and although there is abundant evidence that there is some acquaintance with psychoanalytic terminology the presentation is practically all in terms of conscious rationalization. Fear, Shame, Melanchody are bracketed as “Ego Destroyers”, whatever this may mean. Not a word of the correlation of fear and desire, and the whole conception of ambivalence. The free association which Freud advocated is far from the free association method here spoken of. Nor is it true that before 1900