OTHER RECENT BOOKS
The Interpretation of Dreams, etc. Volumes IV and V of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud; in a new translation. (Hogarth Press. £36 the set of 24 volumes.)
THESE, the first two volumes to be published of the standard edition of Freud's works, are meticulously edited. Every difference between earlier editions is carefully noted, every footnote is dated, and there are frequent cross-references to other books and essays to be included in later volumes. What is more, the text in its new English form reads as easily and smoothly as the nature of the material allows. This is probably a good choice for first of the set. For, thirty years after its first publication, Freud himself considered it to contain the most valuable of all the discoveries it had been his good fortune to make. "Insight such as this," he wrote, "falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime." A reader who begins here will meet the full impact of Freud's violently original ,thought. One by one his unhappy patients bring him dreams of remarkable elaboration, and seemingly accept his shattering interpreta- tions. For the non-professional reader there is a fascination in their morbid rootlessness. Without beliefs and without morals, they present a cross-section of an Imperial city in decay. The brilliant new doctor con- vinced them, because his own dreams—as here set out—were much like their own; and on the basis of his experience in Vienna at the turn of the century the philosophy and clinical theory of psycho-analysis began to be built. Perhaps this book, with its supplementary essay, included in volume V, gives one enough of Freud to base a judgment on, fifty years after.
J. M. C.
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