Wit and Art, and the Unconscious in the scheme of Evolution; and his survey of this formidable assemblage of topics shows evidence of wide reading.

The simple unhampered way in which these complex topics are dealt with will be attractive to the uninformed reader, but raises certain doubts in the minds of more advanced students. In Psycho-Analysis the course of true exposition never doth run smooth, and the facility of presentation which glides. over difficulties renders the science a questionable service, however wellintentioned it may be. Apart from a number of minor inaccuracies of no special moment there is nothing in the text which calls for special criticism, except the misleading impression of symbolism given in the two chapters on dreams. A certain superficiality in interpretation is perhaps inevitable in citing examples for popular consumption; but the prominence given to the occasional phenomenon of auto-symbolism, and the absence of any distinctions between this and symbolism in its accepted Psycho-Analytical sense exposes his interpretations to criticism on the grounds of superficiality in which most PsychoAnalysts would join.

In the same chapters too much stress is laid on the manifestations of adult sexuality in the dream and no hint is given of the much more important and more truly unconscious manifestations of the infantile components and directions of the Libido.

In the same connection the impression is given, surely quite inadvertently, that attempts to divert adult sexual wishes into work and other activities constitute sublimation'-a misapprehension which seems exceedingly tenacious of life.

The bibliography will be found useful by those who may wish to follow up the author's purely introductory mention of the topics touched on.

JAMES GLOVER.

The Kingdom of Evils. By E. E. SOUTHARD and MARY C. JARRETT. With an introduction by RICHARD C. CABOT, and a note upon legal entanglement as a division of evil by RoscoE POUND. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1922. pp. xx, 708. Price 24s. net.

It is perhaps a pity that this volume has received such a title, in that by itself it hardly describes the contents, and may by thus misleading go unread by many who would profit greatly by its study. The evils referred to are diseases and defects of body and mind; educational deficiences; vices and bad habits; legal entanglements; and poverty in their relation to psychiatric social service work. These pages constitute a record of experience of the social service of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, with lengthy comment on a hundred cases selected because of their instructive features. As stated in the preface "Such a work might serve several purposes to suggest ideas to social workers, to reveal to other professional persons the nature of social work, and to throw light upon the problems of mental hygiene for all persons interested in human life."

As psychiatry advances, its scope becomes ever wider, and it becomes increasingly patent that social, domestic, economic, legal, and eugenic factors interlace and must be taken into account when attempts are made to battle with the problem of any individual sufferer. A diagnosis once established, the

physician may be powerless to do anything unaided, and this book in part illustrates how doctor and social worker can co-operate in the care of the mentally deranged and how fruitful such co-operation can be. The former has neither training nor time to bring about the necessary environmental adjustments undertaken by the social service worker. Any psychotherapist of experience in dealing with service pensioners suffering from a neurological disability, must have realized how frequently his therapy was impotent in the face of domestic and economic factors. The authors wisely lay great stress on this point which is by no means adequately borne in mind in this country. "Possibly it is the social problem both superadded to and lying deeply underneath the individual problem that has caused physicians to fail in the past to effect cures in many psychoneuroses, despite the fact that a very perfect individual psychotherapeutic technique was being thoroughly carried out. It is an error of the psychiatrist and the psychologist to rest profound faith in armchair methods of psychotherapy." It would be well for us to grasp the importance and truth of this. This book stands for the individualization of the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric cases.

The first half of the book is descriptive and presents a hundred social cases chosen from varied psychiatric material to illustrate the theory and practice of social work. Every type involving anti-social evils is presented psychoneurotics, psychopathic personalities, psychotics, drug addicts, delinquents, etc., and at some length and detail an insight is given as to the possibilities of adjustment through social work.

In the second half the relation of social work to sociology and psychiatry is discussed and its various methods amply dealt with. It is fully brought home to us that the study of mental disease must involve "not merely life's inner relations as such and life's outer relations as such, but also the adjustments of interrelations of the two." A note upon legal entanglement as a division of evil, three appendices, and a full bibliography close this highly important volume.

Those who have adopted a modern psychiatric viewpoint and who have recognized the practical sterility of the older purely descriptive conceptions which looked upon mental abnormalities as disease entities, will welcome these pages. As far as we know it constitutes the first treatise on psychiatric social work which has become a new profession in America for the educated woman. The thoroughness and enthusiasm of many American psychiatrists should stimulate their confrères in this country. Economical factors for many years will doubtless prevent our National Council for Mental Hygiene from advancing its cause to any appreciable extent. We have sown the seeds of social work in connection with some out-patient clinics, and it is to be hoped that in the course of time such an organization as depicted in these pages will eventuate in England. Though in the book there is much repetition and much that might be compressed, we hesitate to say anything which might seem to militate against its value. From cover to cover there is nothing but which is of great scientific interest and which demonstrates a masterly grasp of all the factors pertaining to psychiatric problems. As an education for all interested in the wider aspects of mental disease its circulation cannot be too wide. The decease of the part-author, Dr Southard, was a great loss to this branch of medicine.

C. STANFORD READ.

Psycho-analysis and Everyman. By D. N. BARBOUR. George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1923. Pp. 191. Price 68. net.

Inspired by the desire to "save the coming generation from some of the needless suffering," etc., Mr Barbour has imposed on himself the task of presenting "to the educated public, in clear language, the more important facts" established by the researches of Freud. The author seems to have overlooked the fact that there are already available in English clear and authoritative presentations of psycho-analysis, although his reference to Freud's Introductory Lectures shows that he is not unfamiliar with the most admirable of all. However that may be, it is perhaps not unreasonable to ask that any new book on the subject should, if not improve on previous models, at least justify its publication by giving an accurate account of the more fundamental conceptions. It cannot be altogether need for simplification, which induces Mr Barbour, at an early stage in his exposition to abandon or modify beyond recognition the most essential parts of Freudian theory. His use of the term 'unconscious' is fundamentally opposed to what is implied by this term in psycho-analysis, and it follows that his understanding of dynamic mechanisms must be unsound, even when much of the terminology used has a familiar ring. This is borne out by much looseness in the use of such terms as repression, censorship, transference, resistance, as also in his description of the aims and method of analysis itself. Needless to say the chapter on dreams is not free from blemish in this respect. Moreover, the author abandons the Freudian connotation of 'libido,' with the inevitable result that his use of 'ego-libido' renders the conception of narcissism entirely incomprehensible.

In these circumstances it is unnecessary to consider in detail, the numerous views and expressions of opinion, often emotionally tinged, whereby Mr Barbour makes it clear in other chapters that a more appropriate title for this book would have been Everyman and Psycho-analysis.

EDWARD GLover.

NOTES ON RECENT PERIODICALS

Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, part II, 1923.

The first original article in this number of the Zeitschrift is contributed by Dr Imre Hermann (Budapest) and entitled "Marginal Preference as a Primary Process." By marginal preference' the author means that tendency which manifests itself, as he has found by experiment, in young children to choose from a series of similar objects placed before them that which is at the one or the other end of the row. The same tendency has been observed in animals. In human beings after the age of six years a tendency to choose an object from the middle of the series appears ('Mittelwahltendenz'). Dr Hermann believes the former tendency to be a primitive mode of mental functioning-a primary process-and his article shows how it operates in various spheres of thought and feeling, e.g. in the reflex arc, in certain physical expressions of affects, in dreams and the formation of neurotic symptoms. He discusses the relation of 'marginal preference' to the pleasure-principle and concludes that they are closely connected but are not related as the special to the general. In the second section of his paper he cites certain facts, in particular with reference to optical illusions, in support of the thesis that every mental process which reaches consciousness passes through successive stages of more primitive mental organization, a thesis maintained by Ferenczi in the sphere of sex and by Schilder in that of thought.

In a short article on "The Infantile Genital Organization" Professor Freud supplements, and to some extent corrects, his exposition of infantile sexuality in "Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex." In that work he said that in the choice of a love-object we have the closest approximation to the final form assumed by the sexual life after puberty and that the primacy of the genitals is only partially, if at all, established during the infantile period. He now speaks of a primacy of the phallus and shows that there is a phase which may be called that of an infantile genital organization in which only the male genital organ plays any part. His account of this phase and of its importance in mental life has reference only to what takes place in boys: the situation in the case of girls is, he says, not yet clear. The boy passes from his first assumption that every person and animal possess a genital like his own to the discovery that it is not everyone who has a penis. He conceives of the lack of this organ as the result of castration, possibly as a punishment for some forbidden activity. Hence he still attributes the possession of the penis to those whom he especially esteems, above all to his mother. Later, when he realizes that only women can bear children, the child is regarded as a substitute for the penis. In the pregenital anal-sadistic phase there is as yet no distinction between male and female, but simply that between active and passive. Before the former distinction is apprehended there intervenes the phase of infantile genital organization in which the basis of the distinction is the possession of the penis and the loss of it through castration.

Dr Hans Sachs (Berlin) contributes a paper on "The Genesis of the Perversions." He takes as his starting-point Freud's doctrine that a perversion implies the persistence of a specially strong instinct-component which does not fall under the primacy of the genital zone ("Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex"). He goes on to consider the relation of the perversion to the Oedipus complex, to the Unconscious and to repression. In his paper "A Child is Being Beaten" Freud showed that the Oedipus complex is, as it were, a lens through which the ray which is the perversion must travel. Dr Sachs holds that this is true of all perversions. Further, while we are familiar with the view that neurosis is the negative of perversion, the pervert, no less than the neurotic, displays amnesia for infantile experiences and his analysis leads to the discovery of unconscious material. In the one case a repressed phantasy manifests itself as a neurotic symptom, alien to the ego, while in the other case it is in agreement with the ego (ichgerecht) and is felt as pleasurable. Both neurosis and perversion are exaggerations of some part of normal infantile sexual

life, neurosis arising from the incompatibility of repressed material with the ego. A perversion approximates to neurosis in cases where the perverse gratification is experienced only at the cost of constant conflict or where pleasure is converted into anxiety if certain conditions are transgressed. He postulates a series in which cravings, e.g. for alcohol, morphia, etc., occupy a middle position between neurosis and perversion. Such cravings appear to have the force of an obsessional neurosis but they resemble perversions in that they result in a definite act of gratification, though it may be a surrogate gratification for a repressed pleasure.

In the masochistic perverse phantasy described by Freud in "A Child is Being Beaten" we see that though the persons and the scene of the phantasy change so as to become indifferent, one element (that of being beaten) remains constant through the successive stages and to this factor the pleasure is attached. This fragmentary character of the perverse gratification is found in other perversions and explains their grotesque forms: only a piece of the whole complex has been admitted into consciousness.

In order that a piece of infantile sexual life should thus persist, not only must the predominating instinct-component be peculiarly strong either from constitutional reasons or owing to infantile experiences, but that piece of infantile sexuality must bear a special relation to the ego, if it is to escape repression. In cover-memories the escape is accomplished through the indifference of the content of the memory, and in obsessional neurosis through the separation of the affect from the content to which it really belongs, but neither of these characteristics applies to the perversion. Dr Sachs shows that where an instinct-component is so strong as to be practically insuperable a compromise may be effected, by which one part of the whole complex is accepted by the ego and retains its pleasure-giving character. It is, in fact, taken into the service of the repressing forces in the ego, in order that the rest of the complex may be the more easily repressed. In the perverse beating-phantasies the anal-sadistic component has assisted in the repression of the forbidden genital desire which is part of the Oedipus complex. Perverts are not exempt from neurosis, for, though one element has been taken up into the ego, other elements of the complex may be too strong for successful repression.

The last original article is by Dr R. Brun (Zürich) on "The Theory of Selection and the Pleasure Principle." The writer posits the existence, side by side with and sometimes in opposition to, the Darwinian principle of natural selection (in accordance with the reality principle), of another phylogenetic factor which he terms that of libidinal selection. This latter principle may, he believes, guide the instinctive behaviour of living organisms, solely in accordance with the pleasure principle, even where the end must be degeneration or destruction of the species. His argument is based on experiments carried out by Father Wasmann, who investigated the behaviour of certain species of ants. This number contains the following short communications, as well as critical notes and reviews:

'History of a case of melancholia" (Federn), "Substitute formations for onanism" (Happel), "A voyeur type" (Boehm), "The spider as a dream-symbol" (Bornsztaja), "The dream as the guardian of sleep" (Pfeifer).

CECIL BAINES.

Annales Médico-Psychologiques (Series XII, vol. 2).

No. 3. October 1922.

Chronique: Le Congrès des Aliénistes de Quimper (1922). (P. Courbon.)
Réponse à une Critique Allemande: Les Idées de Hoche et de Binding. (Dr Maurice
Brissot.)

Deals with ideas expressed by Professors Hoche and Bindung who "declare that certain valueless lives might be terminated, to the great benefit of the community." These lives are classified as (1) Incurables-either from sickness or wounds, who desire-in full consciousness death. (2) The incurably insane. (3) Those, sound of mind, yet unconscious through a severe accident or wound, which will inevitably prove mortal.