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This interesting monograph deals with four main topics of sadomasochistic import, namely, the psychology of war, suicide, the obsessive neuroses, and a pathography of Jean Arthur Rimbaud, the famous French poet (1854-91).
In his discussion of suicide the author emphasizes the chain of psychological events which characterizes the process, i.e., the loss of the love or libidinized object, the desire of the ego to recapture this object, its inability to do so, and finally the identification of the ego with the lost object which leads to the fatal act of suicide.
The psychology of depressive states, the representations of death in suicide and the role of aggression in suicide are all discussed at length. It seems that aggression in suicidal situations is a part of the attempt to recapture the lost love object. A diagram is given, illustrating the author's formulation of the relationship of the various mechanisms concerned in suicidal acts, including the loss of the love object, aggression or the struggle for repossession of this object, the masochistic deformation, and the identification phenomena.
Following a description of the symptoms of an obsessive neurosis, there is a psychoanalytic evaluation of the obsessive type of personality with emphasis on the id, ego and super ego factors, and a psychoanalysis of the outstanding clinical manifestations including suicidal obsessions, persistent doubts, superstitions, sexualization of thought, and the secondary struggles with the environment. The characteristics of the obsessive type, the development of the neurosis, and the applications of the psychoanalytic theories in these problems are well presented.
The final section in the book describes the life of the French poet, Jean Arthur Rimbaud, who exerted a far reaching influence on his contemporaries. Beginning with an account of his family background, the life story is followed through infancy into the years of maturity. Born in Charleville, and while still very young, Rimbaud