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A 380 octavo page book with index, impatiently easy and patiently difficult to classify. If the former, one dismisses it as mystical moonshine; if the latter, one finds it more worthy and sincere, and if, with Coleridge, we are able to become more ‘esemplastic,’ can find much of significance behind the phrases used, even if these particular phrasings are a bit apart from those of ordinary, common life.
The jacket cover tells us that the keynote of this psychological study is that the unconscious constitutes the symbolic, in a new and final sense, more basically than it does the primitive, the undifferentiated, the repressed, or even the compensatory as such. The purely conscious constitutes the factual. The concepts of symbol and fact are here carried to their ultimate conclusion. Symbol is the elemental holistic unit of Meaning; fact the correlative, elemental, but differentiating unit of Actuality.
“Thus finally emerges a new philosophy of existence, whose ultimate duality of Meaning and Actuality can more awarely be fused, from the living center, in the only total Reality. Eventually, it may be God.”
The science of psychoanalysis is not primarily interested in philosophy, even if we accept philosophy as an “affectionate seeking after truth,” again quoting Coleridge, and certainly psychoanalysts believe they have such a yearning.
Even if content to observe, to collect and classify their findings, they perforce must abstract and generalize in order to apply. This, we dimly remember, was Aristotle's conception of science and, in general, is not foreign to the author's main trends, even if not so pedantically phrased. In fact, his phrasing, for us, requires a large mixture of ‘esemplasticity’ and restrained tension to attempt to get at his meaning.
The concept of the energy distributive capacity of the symbol has always intrigued the reviewer, and Freud's method of entrance into the ‘unconscious’ made it more vital and actual. This the author himself emphasizes, and he se