Books: Mallet of Malice

-THE DISPOSSESSED (244 pp.)—Geoffrey Wagner—Devin-Adair ($3.50).

A novelist bent on discrediting a popular idea may choose to 1) give the reader an intellectual hotfoot, i.e., singe his brain with a better idea, 2) tickle his funnybone with satire, 3) clout him over the head with the blunt instrument of anger. British-born Novelist Geoffrey Wagner belongs to the blunt-instrument school. His mallet of malice falls on psychiatry and especially psychoanalysis, its high priests, practices and pretensions. With scarcely a smidgen of saving humor, but with much righteous wrath, The Dispossessed argues that Freud, Jung, Adler, et al. are bloodletters of the psyche whose...