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This book is in its way almost a masterpiece of descriptive clinical pathology. In medicine the underlying disorder must be demonstrated at the bedside, but in psychiatry, and particularly in psychoanalysis, the only method available is the study of case histories. This book consists of a series of case histories which are used to demonstrate psychoanalytic theories. The author belongs to the orthodox freudian school, and everything which she writes is orthodox and based on analytic experience. The theoretical part of the book takes its point of departure from Freud's more recent works, particularly "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," "The Ego and the Id" and "Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety." It presupposes some basic knowledge of psychoanalysis and its terminology. The theoretical discussions are based on Freud's more recent theory of the diffusion of the instincts, and the case histories form, as it were, a chronological series which illustrate the working of