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In her past work Gina Kaus has given ample evidence of her capacity to deal with social and psychological problems. She has edited a journal, The Mother, which brought her into personal advisory contact with the marital and maternal problems of many women through its work with child-rearing and allied questions. There have been two plays and two
novels in addition to the one at hand. Of chief importance has been her study of the history and social background of Eighteenth Century Russia against which was drawn an incisive psychological portrait of Catharine the Great.
In the present sensitive and psychologically illuminating novel Miss Kaus gives further evidence of her analytic insight into some of the main psychoinstinctual conflicts which in woman may come to govern not only the lines of individual behavior but also mold the adaptation of other persons to their own ends. Thus in Melanie the psychoanalytically oriented reader will find a skillful handling of the dynamically logical situations evolved about a woman hemmed in by strong anal-aggressive and narcissistic drives. Viewed mainly in her relations with Albert, a younger man deflected from creative aims through her demands for marriage plus the insistence of his mother who scents money and “position” in the offing, the development is shown in sequences tracing a series of personality interrelations to the tragedy awaiting both themselves and others: death for Melanie, in which the unconscious hand of Albert is not entirely uninvolved, whereby he sought freedom from her domination in a further union made finally insupportable both by the fresh super-ego pressure derived from the circumstances of his wife's death and by the continued desuetude of creative discipline.
All the facets of this enlightening history cannot be indicated here. It comprehends situations frequently met with by the practising analyst, and in the form thus presented should be of special interest in that regard. Little of it is overdrawn.