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We have on several occasions made reference to this scholarly work in its original French edition. Now after some time it appears in English dress with a short, too short, Introduction by Dr. E. B. Strauss, Physician for Psychological Medicine at St. Bartholomews Hospital, London. Typically pussyfooted as is this British approach, in the Introduction, it would appear that only just about almost the middle of this century does our valiant “psychological physician at St. Bartholomews” take up the cudgels for a cause that has been fought, won and forgotten almost 40 years and whoever offered the small bit of text for the fly leaf certainly must have come out of the grave to tender it.
Among other things Dr. Strauss tells us in this Introduction that “philosophers”—many of them—have rejected in toto the psychoanalytic concepts. “Ye Gods,” think of the graveyards filled with dead philosophies! Dr. Strauss mentions the early anti-Freudian work of Régis & Hesnard but passes over its complete reversal of statement and belief in its later editions. Nor is he better oriented to Claude's experiment which brought about the change in the St. Anne laboratories and the initial work of LaForgue and his confréres.
But, let the dead bury their dead, and let the psychiatric world rejoice over this two volume masterpiece of Dr. Dalbiez, certainly one of the outstanding presentations of the subject, even if very, very tardily appearing on the scene and after the battle is practically over, save in the hinterlands of invested thinking of the “philosophers.”
The reviewer would very much like to enter fully into this splendid restatement of well known concepts—i.e., to American psychiatrists—but we have done so so frequently we must restrain our impulses to repetitiveness.
We can however express our admiration and can recommend to our psychiatric confréres this more than praiseworthy resumé of the Freudian concepts.