Two Against Freud

IN DEFENSE OF LOVE--GertY.Gontard --Alliance ($2.50).

THE SUCCESSFUL ERROR--Rudolf Allers

--Sheed & Ward ($3).

The field of psycho-investigation opened by Sigmund Freud has been plowed, tramped, and camped on. In spite of picnickers with ants in their pants and farmers with bees in their bonnets, the field has produced some good grain, along with many a tare. Last week the field was entered by two authors who analyze the work of Freud by widely differing methods but reach the same conclusion: that psychoanalysis is an overrated science.

Definitely a picnicker in Freud's field, and a badly behaved one, is Gert V. Gontard who does some curious things:

> In praising Austrian Otto Gross, who insisted that psychoanalysis be used as an instrument of violent revolution, he becomes so favorably excited that he talks of analysis as if he believed in it.

>In a hard spanking of Havelock Ellis, he accuses Ellis of betraying his Puritanism by using the word obscenity--though he himself has used the whole thesaurus of sexual fear and shame.

>Finally, after defining psychoanalysis as "a new mechanistic system of demonology," he sketches the "brotherhood" of U. S. analysts as a sort of cross between the fifth column and the perpetrators of the Protocols of Zion, warns of their insidious power to vitiate the population. In tones suggestive of Nazi mystical eugenics, he recommends that the U. S. get shut of them, devote itself to breeding youths gloriously "fit" for defensive warfare.

As a showpiece of vituperation, In Defense of Love is, to put it mildly, stimulating. As an exhibit of bad critical behavior, it is depressing. Because it is exceedingly readable, it will have an appeal out of all scale to its worth.

* * *

Longer than In Defense of Love, as unaggressive and scrupulous as the latter is hog-wild, is The Successful Error, by Rudolf Allers. Rudolf Allers is a psychiatrist, formerly of Vienna, and a Catholic. Like many a well-educated Catholic, he uses the instruments not of faith but of logic, thereby finds psychoanalysis illogical in its premises, highly rationalized in their proofs. That one such volume should destroy psychoanalysis is most improbable. That laymen should feel qualified either to swallow or spit out its arguments is only too possible. But that such a volume may aid in the reduction-to-scale of a science too liable to theological elephantiasis is most devoutly to be hoped.

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