Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/75

 BOOK REVIEWS

67

equally alive to the physiolo^cal correlates of their findings and have many times insisted on the importance of connecting the two aspects of hysteria; it would be truer to say that Janet's doctrine is a medical and Freud's a biological one. We note three historical slips; Freud did not treat the celebrated Frau Anna O. with Breuer (p. 42); it was Adler, not Maeder, who was 'the first to insist that the dream is occupied with the dreamer's current problems and must be interpreted as an unconscious effort at adjustment of the difficulties of his life' (p. 108); it was not Freud, but KrafFt-Ebing, who instituted the con- ception of the obsessional neurosis, in 1S64 {p. 117). Dr. Mitchell writes of dream SiTnbols: 'The associations which would lead to tlie discovery of their meaning have not been formed in the life of the individual" they were formed in some far back period of the history of the race' (p. lOS). We consider the first of these statements to be more than doubtful and think that it would have been well to have worded the second one more cautiously by inserting the word 'probably'. In the account given of transference during treatment (pp. 140-1} a misleading impression is apt to be produced on the reader's mind by the undue stress laid on the openly erotic manifestations, which in practice are rather rare, certainly in comparison with the more negative aspects of transference.

There are a couple of points we should like to see elaborated in a future edition, cramped though Dr. Mitchell obviously is for space. In describing the development of the psycho-analytic technique (p. 82) he seems to convey the impression that the search for memories related to a particular symptom was replaced by the method of free association, a method which of course was the essentia] one in all stages of the development. It would have been better to have contrasted the three st^es of working from a symptom, search for complexes, and investi- gation of resistances, which constitute the actual changes in development. We are a litde surprised that Dr. Mitchell has not taken advantage of his interest in precise definition to give an account of the three senses in which the term 'regression* is used in Psycho-Analysis (p. 94). In his account of the obsessional neurosis (p. 131) there might have been room for a sentence or two giving the relation of the ambivalency to the conflict bet\veen love and hate, with an indication of the anal-sadistic source of the disorder. In discussing McDougall's and Ferencai's views on suggestion (p. 155) there is no aUusion to Trotter's relation of it to the herd-instinct. Further we should be glad to see a short account of the different modes of falling neurotically ill, on the lines of the types indicated by Freud.

In describing the views of Adler, Jung and Maeder, Dr. Mitchell has been so anxious to avoid all criticism until the last page of the book that he has, as we think, unduly refrained from illuminating these views

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