Review of Wilhelm Neutra's Letters to Neurotic Women1

It should be taken as an encouraging sign of the awakening interest in psychotherapy that a second edition of this book has been called for so quickly. Unluckily we cannot hail the book itself as an encouraging phenomenon. The author, who is an assistant physician in the Gainfarn hydropathic institute near Vienna, has borrowed the form of Oppenheim's Psychothera-peutische Briefe2 and has given that form a psycho-analytic content. This is in a sense ill-judged, since psycho-analysis cannot be satisfactorily combined with Oppenheim's (or, if that is preferred, Dubois'3) technique of ‘persuasion’ it looks for its therapeutic results along quite other paths. What is more important, however, is the fact that the author fails to attain the merits of his model—tact and moral seriousness—and that in his presentation of psycho-analytic theory he often drops into empty rhetoric and is also guilty of some misstatements. Nevertheless much of what he writes is neatly and aptly expressed; and the book may pass muster as a work for popular consumption. In a more serious, scientific exposition of the subject the author would have had to indicate the sources of his views and assertions with greater conscientiousness.