Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable, as he is but the field of combat for forces that have entered him, distended him, and hold sway inside his skin. Thus psychoanalysis is, primarily, sophomoric. Shockers are to explain man to us, and the whole drama of existence is played out between piggishness and the sublimation into which civilized effort can transform it.

So I really ought to be thankful to Professor Yowitt, for maintaining my likeness in the classical style and not borrowing the methods of the Michigan psychologists. Not that I intend to speak better of myself than they would speak; but there is, surely, a difference between a caricature and a portrait.

Which is not to say that I believe a man who is the subject of biographies possesses any greater knowledge of himself than his biographers do. Their position is more convenient, for uncertainties may be attributed to a lack of data, which allows the supposition that the one described, were he but alive and willing, could supply the needed information. The one described, however, possesses nothing more than hypotheses on the subject of himself, hypotheses that may be of interest as the products of his mind but that do not necessarily serve as those missing pieces.

With sufficient imagination a man could write a whole series of versions of his life; it would form a union of sets in which the facts would be the only elements in common.