Three for Thinkers

Mr Rieff’s sympathetic yet truly critical study of Freud exposes certain confusions which underlie the norms of mechanist psychology. On the one hand Freud admired the ‘instinctual hero’; on the other, the aim of Freudian psychiatry is not the triumph of instinct over moral feelings but the ‘reconciliation of instinct and intelligence’. Mr Rieff’s study is lucid, thoughtful and temperate. One can freely recommend it to the ordinary reader.

Professor Kauffman is a less temperate writer. His book belongs to that genre in which literary figures of different eras are made to rub shoulders, exchange compliments, and express opinions which they might or might not have acceded to. It seems that the author has two unrelated major aims – to prove that Shakespeare, Goethe and various other great writers, were agnostics, and to prove that subjective enthusiasm in philosophy produced and could again produce Fascism and anti-Semitic atrocities. In neither aim does he wholly succeed, for his illustrations are frequently arbitrary, though the quality of his thought is diverse and fecund.

It is pleasant to meet in Dr Wilson’s survey and analysis of Yeats’s symbolism a book that one can praise without reservation. He examines Four Plays for Dancers, The Cat and the Moon, and twelve related poems, and interprets them by a broad use of the alchemical and Hermetic philosophy which undoubtedly influenced Yeats’s thought. A good analysis deepens one’s understanding of a text. The subtlety and vigour of Dr Wilson’s exposition leaves nothing to be desired, and any student of Yeats will gain immensely by reading it.

1961 (245)