The “psychoanalysis” of literary works and literary figures is an old tradition among freudians. Beginning early in the century when the psychoanalysts were still struggling both for recognition as well as for patients, these workers, perhaps for lack of actual living patients with whom they could work, turned their attention to the analysis of this type as the second-best substitute. This kind of effort still persists more as an applied psychoanalysis than in any scientific desire to verify their theories or discover new data. It affords an interesting, often stimulating application of freudian depth psychology to a wider area than the purely clinical.

The book under review is such a work. Originally published in France in 1933, it is now translated into English for the first time. It is probably the most thorough psychoanalysis of a great writer and his extant literary