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The recent death of Otto Fenichel has been a serious blow to American psychiatry and psychoanalysis. A man of tremendous industry, enormous acquaintance with the literature of analysis, he was almost the analyst's analyst. He leaves in this work a more than fitting monument. It is a volume which will remain for a long year a classic source for those working in the field.
In 1934, there was published his “Outline of Clinical Psychoanalysis” which has been unavailable for a number of years. Fenichel was asked to prepare a second edition but he preferred to write a new book which would not only treat the matter of the earlier book more systematically, but would include the “general” as well as “special” theory of the neurosis. We are most fortunate that he was able to complete the work. There is grave doubt that any one else could have done such a tremendous task.
The book is the most comprehensive treatise of the whole field and contribution of psychoanalysis which we have in any language. It is a clear, systematic exposition of psychoanalytic theory and application to clinical analysis and clinical psychiatry. So complete and thorough is the work as to be really an encyclopedia of current psychoanalytic knowledge. The outstanding feature is Fenichel's thorough understanding and familiarity with the field and its literature, and consequently he is able to give it an impression of dynamic unity which perhaps does not yet freely exist. The uneven, irregular and abstruse development of analytic theory is given formulation, consistency and coherence which proves amazingly convincing, and points the way to much needed future work at many points. His clarity and mastery of the difficult, contradictory, and often confusing, descriptions and formulations leaves the reader with an impression that Fenichel could only have attained such mastery by extraordinarily intense mental application and almost incessant work. The book is free of contentiousness and factiousness. He avoid