solving again a bit of supposed arbitrariness would probably then appear. As, however, we have not access to the psychic life of the author, we leave to him the undiminished right of building up a thoroughly valid development on an improbable supposition, a right which Shakespeare, for example, has asserted in _King Lear_. Otherwise, we wish to repeat, Wilhelm Jensen has given us an absolutely correct study in psychiatry, in which we may measure our understanding of psychic life, a story of illness and cure adapted to the inculcation of certain fundamental teachings of medical psychology. Strange enough that he should have done this! What if, in reply to questioning, he should deny this intention? It is so easy to draw comparisons and to put constructions on things. Are we not rather the ones who have woven secret meanings, which were foreign to him, into the beautiful poetic tale? Possibly; we shall come back to that later. As a preliminary, however, we have tried to refrain from interpretations with that tendency, by reproducing the story, in almost every case, from the very words of the writer; and we have had him furnish text as well as commentary, himself. Any one who will compare our text with that of _Gradiva_ will have to grant this. Perhaps in the judgment of the majority we are doing a poor service for him when we declare his work a study in psychiatry. An author is to avoid all contact with psychiatry, we are told, and leave to physicians the portrayal of morbid psychic conditions. In reality no true author has ever heeded this commandment. The portrayal of the psychic life of human beings is, of course, his most especial domain; he was always the precursor of science and of scientific psychology. The borderline between normal and morbid psychic conditions is, in a way, a conventional one, and, in another way, in such a state of flux that probably every one of us oversteps it many times in the course of a day. On the other hand, psychiatry would do wrong to wish to limit itself continually to the study of those serious and cloudy illnesses which arise from rude disturbances of the delicate psychic apparatus. It has no less interest in the lesser and adjustable deviations from the normal which we cannot yet trace back farther than disturbances in the play of psychic forces; indeed, it is by means of these that it can understand normal conditions, as well as the manifestations of serious illness. Thus the author cannot yield to the psychiatrist nor the psychiatrist to the author, and the poetic treatment of a theme from psychiatry may result correctly without damage to beauty. The imaginative representation of the story of illness and its treatment, which we can survey better after finishing the story and relieving our own suspense, is really correct. Now we wish to reproduce it with the technical expressions of our science, in doing which it will not be necessary to repeat what has already been related.