PARTISAN REVIEW
at the expense of his subjects; and despite all the vaunted claims of
the intelligence, and the undeniable imprints of an extraordinary intel–
ligence in almost every sentence, for my part I am inclined to find the
intelligence operating in literature at a higher level in some of Eliot's
essays-an intelligence really immersed in and grappling with its objects.
A literary man to his fingertips, Valery sought to refine himself out
of literature, to exist on the margins of consciousness, while all the time
he was in fact only digging in the laboratory out of which came the very
great poetry.
William Barrett
FREUD IN HIS MIDDLE PERIOD
ON WAR, SEX, AN.D NEUROSIS. By Sigmund Freud. Edited by Sonder
Kotz, with
!!
Prefoce ond Definitive Glossory by Poul Goodmon. Arts
&
Science Press. $3.00.
Not since the appearance of
The Basic Writ ings
under the
Modern Library imprint has there been a collection of Freud's work at
once so comprehensive and so various as this latest volume, which con–
sists of nine out-of-print and unavailable essays drawn from the middle
period of Freud's career. The editors speak of their criteria of selection
as follows: "that everything be important and intelligible to the non–
technical reader, and that it indicate the range of the application of
psychoanalysis, from clinical medicine through anthropology to general
problems of politics, morals, and education," and it can fairly be said that
this editorial standard is confirmed by the material included in the book.
The longest as well as the most important essay is undoubtedly "Dora:
an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," one of Freud's great case histories,
unfortunately much too little known in this country because none of
them have previously been included in popular Freud reprints. (Volume
III of Freud's
Collected Papers,
brought out in England by the Hogarth
Press, contains most of them.) The most striking of the other essays is
called "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life"; it is
one of the most revolutionary and pessimistic of Freud's statements in
that it comes to the conclusion, by way of a marvelously subtle analysis
of psychic impotence, that there is something in the nature of the sexual
instinct itself which is basicaJly unfavorable to absolute gratification.
Adherents of Reich,
with
his utopian theory of sexual satisfaction, would
252
