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Attempts to understand the behavior of an individual are essentially of two kinds: those which are based on the inner plan and purpose of the individual doing the behaving, and those based on the plan and purpose made of the behavior by the individual doing the observing. This book is an exposition and an espousal of the former frame of reference, namely the “personal” world of the individual. It also presents a theory of human motivation which should be open to examination on its own, regardless of the frame of reference from which it is seen. The theoretical conclusions are then applied to the fields of social organization, education, abnormal behavior, and psychotherapy. This book therefore consists of many parts, with a unifying principle running through them, and all dealing with important problems and raising important questions.
For the psychoanalyst, this book is of interest in several ways. It represents a sharp departure from the “objective” frame of reference which much of academic psychology has generally been following and is bold in accepting and defending on scientific grounds the personal one it advocates. It adds confirmation of the essential rightness of the direction psychoanalysis has taken in recent years as to theory of human motivation and therapy. It makes contributions of its own which may in turn be of use to psychoanalytic theory. These are not the conclusions of the authors of this book. Although they acknowledge that the impetus for their point of view first came from Freud, they have little to say about psychoanalysis generally and nothing about the contributions of Adler, Fromm, or Horney. They would not agree that psychoanalysis operates more than partly from the basis of the personal world of the individual. They say nothing about the relationship of “free association” to the method of therapy which they feel more wholly allows the individual to reach his inner meanings, namely, the non-directive approach. Nevertheless, the implicatio