Description
Among the great number of books on psychoanalysis published in our days, there are comparatively few which as to their aims and their method of presentation are comparable to Dr. Brenner’s Elementary Textbook. Psychoanalysis is here consistently viewed as a science that fundamentally, not only occasionally, reaches out toward a general psychological theory, far beyond the sphere of pathological mental functioning. The need for a book of this kind has been apparent to many of us for quite some time; it will be most welcome to the student of analysis as well as to the student of many related fields in which the relevance of analytic findings and of the analytic approach has been realized.
If one had to choose among the many merits of this book, one might say that its outstanding feature is the extraordinary clarity with which a highly complex subject is communicated, without any essentials being sacrificed to the demands for popularization. Obvi-ously, no such attempt toward the “exposition of fundamentals” can be a mere summary. The author’s personal thinking of omnipresent: in style, selection, evaluation, and integration. Here again, Dr. Bren-ner manifests considerable skill and an uncommonly comprehensive knowledge. He structures the field for the reader by establishing a hierarchy of the hypotheses he introduces and by convincingly demonstrating their interrelatedness.
