Shorter Notice
As the Editor's preface points out, future generations will probably be exceedingly anxious to understand what kind of man Freud was, and his own deep reserve will have the effect of sending them to the reminiscences of his friends and colleagues. "The deepest and final memory he left with us is the memory of his utter sincerity. . . . He himself was greater than his work," declares Theodor Reik in the first chapters of this book, which are devoted mainly to personal reminiscences. Thus we are told that when asked by a London weekly to express his opinion on the persecution of the Jews, Freud refused, citing a French proverb : "Le bruit est pour le pot La plainte est pour le sot ; L'honnete hornme trompe S'en va et ne dit mot."
Again, when asked, rather floridly, whether he felt an overruling joy when he first captured the psychic conceptions contained in Tobias and Taboo, he answered, "I felt nothing like that ; simply an extraordinary clarity." This part of the book gives a very attractive picture of the master, of his eyes with their "expression of hardy quest," his wit and his tolerance. He emerges as less pessimistic and dogmatic than he is sometimes depicted. The remain- ing chapters have little or no biographical material, but discuss Freud's critical approach to the main cultural problems which he treated in The Future of an Illusion and Civilisation and Its Dis- contents. Dr. Reik also admonishes the glib and fashionable masters of the more superficial Freudian technicalities.
"The essential matter of psycho-analysis cannot be learned, it can only be lived. . . . The most important aspects of technique can only be experienced."
Correction: In a review of That Bad Man, by Wickham Steed, on August 21st, the price of the book was stated as 6s. instead of 55.
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