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Dr. Gutheil is a disciple, rather a servile one, of W. Stekel. He writes this book on dream interpretation, he says, because those in existence are “too little instructive or are out of date,” and his idol “is the ablest dream interpreter in the world.”
This obvious misinformation and fulsome praise does not predispose us in favor of the book as we open it. Nor are we much enlightened as we go on with the author's “absorption of Stekel's discoveries.”
It is not for a reviewer to tell an author how to write a book, but somebody should have instructed Dr. Guthiel on the elementary principles of presentation. He reverses all the canons of preliminary definitions, logical relations and orderly progression and offers a veritable hodgepodge that might have been a useful vade mecum if order or a sense of proportion were among its mental attributes. One might suspect that the ‘disorder’ of the dream's manifest content had been made the arbiter of the author's mode of handling the phenomena.
Then again there are, for us, too many dogmatic or semi-dogmatic statements which we believe are not true. In the first place the parts played by the intra-psychical processes and those that come to conscious awareness through the repressing mechanisms of the Ego and Super-Ego are far from being clearly stated. Instead of differentiating early the manifest and latent aspects of the dream process, we have a lot about telepathy, cryptamnesia and prophecy and day remnants, and the futile questions of when we dream, how long dreams last, physical conditions, etc., etc.
There is much useful material in the book, and we regret we have to say uncomplimentary things about it because of its disorderly arrangement, at times naive and puerile explanations, its superficial psychological understanding of most intricate and subtle phenomena which stand in obvious contrasts to the superior works of Freud, of Jones, Melanie Klein and others too numerous to mention.
We find no ample justification for one of t