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Dr. Abrahamsen, noted already for his contributions to psychologic and psychiatric thought, presents now a fascinating and well-documented, if sometimes merely conjectural, study of a figure who appears to have remained, to some extent, shrouded in a cloak of mystery.
The Mind and Death of a Genius endeavors to offer, from a character-ologico-psychiatric point of view, a systematic analysis of the workings of Otto Weininger's mind. A brilliant and erratic young Viennese biologist, Weininger was hurled in 1903 into a startling international fame by virtue of a single book, Sex and Character. It is rather odd, to say the least, that up to this time no one writing in English has felt inclined to tackle at such length, or in such detail, the problem of Otto Weininger. There can be no doubt that his ostensibly revolutionary ideas on sex and character have been discussed and challenged in lay quarters as well as in psychologic and psychiatric circles.
In the preparation of this volume, Dr. Abrahamsen has enjoyed the close coöperation of Weininger's sister, Rosa, and of others who knew Weininger, or at least had some personal contact with him. Dr. Abrahamsen's own deductions and surmises concerning Weininger's character and mind are always interesting, and sometimes genuinely provocative. In the writing of his book, the author seems to have kept before him a favorite concept of Lombroso; namely, the intimate relation between genuis and madness. For apparently Dr. Abrahamsen is fundamentally in accord with those who continue to regard Otto Weininger as an undoubted genius, a young man with stimulating ideas and a markedly original type of intellect.
Since the time of his death by suicide at the age of twenty-three, Weininger has been remembered best, of course, by his theory of constitutional bisexuality—a theory, however, which Freud has elected to attribute to Fliess, just as Bloch has elected to attribute it to Heinse. But regardless of whether such a postulate actually ori