Do-It-Yourself Freud

ANALYZE YOURSELF (320 pp.]--Prince Leopold Loewensteln & William Gerhard!--Hawthorn Books ($3.95).

Every highbrow worth his martini nowadays has enough psychoanalytical know-how to trace his best friend's fallen arches back to infantile stresses and strains or to see homicidal tendencies merely as the mask of a basically shy, reticent character. Now, thanks to the appearance of this book, any lowbrow can also learn to take the first fumbling steps towards a total misunderstanding of human nature.

Analyze Yourself first snorkeled in Britain about 20 years ago, looking like a jolly parlor game for rainy nights. "Adapted" for U.S. consumption by Editor Victor Rosen, the book still has an air of semi-solemn fun-with-Freud and what-every-Jung-man-should-know. Moreover, its prose is so plain that a roomful of safecrackers and their molls might well while away the hours before the gelignite goes up by browsing through the work. Its most startling feature is a questionnaire jig-sawed by Authors William Gerhardi (holder of the Czarist Order of St. Stanislav) and Prince Leopold Loewenstein ("a graduate of the University of Vienna"). Although both authors lack professional psychiatric qualifications, their couchside manner is soothing as a deep trance, their text chockablock with neat quotes from Greek Philosopher ("Know Thyself") Thales, Robert ("To see oursels as ithers see us") Burns, Matthew ("Resolve to be thyself") Arnold. Readers answer yes or no to a string of loaded questions including: "Are you an illegitimate child?", "Are your phobias strong ones?", "Are you afraid of burglars?", "Do you dislike touching doorknobs?", "Was your father of a generally cheerful nature?" After that, according to their answers, readers are deployed into further quizzes. Some of these are dead-easy to answer, e.g., "Do you feel it is an absolute 'must' to attend funerals?" Others, such as "Do you believe water always finds its own level?", are difficult to answer in the negative except by flat-earth men and extreme skeptics. Comes at last the big moment when the well-quizzed reader reaches the pages containing his analysis ("Yourself as you really are") and settles down to a tasty feast of ham-and-egoism. "You are a fraud--a clever, charming, amusing fraud"; "You may be regarded ... as highly intelligent, yet your intelligence is curiously limited, sterile, and stunted"; "In many respects you are not a bad woman"; "You are a bit like a character out of a Chekhov play . . ."

Authors Gerhardi and Loewenstein have obviously spent many hours of near-simian ingenuity on Analyze Yourself. Though many of their conclusions are demonstrably false ("Don Juan or donkey, we are all alike in our love-making") and sometimes alarming ("Every male in the grip of passion behaves . . . like an impetuous bull"), others are shrewd and accurate, e.g., "As an artist ... do not labor under any illusion that society will safeguard or sustain you."

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