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The intention of the author is to give an introduction to psychoanalytical theory and its status in relation to modern psychology, for ‘students and non-specialists’. There are clear and generally satisfactory summaries of basic Freudian theories, followed by a discussion of some of the objections which have been made to them, and of some solutions. Then follow five chapters detailing experimental psychological investigations which have sought to test the validity of the main categories of psychoanalytic theory: child development, oedipus and castration complexes, dreaming, the nature of the unconscious. Then comes a discussion of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and of the general psychological and social implications of the theory, and a brief useful statement of conclusions.
For a student who knows little of psychoanalysis, the summaries of theory should give a reliable panoramic view of the subject without bogging him down in details and developments which he should only come to gradually, through wider reading. For someone who is familiar with the subject, they are adequate but suffer in the way summaries often do, by seeming bald, over-definite and not qualified or illuminated by the detailed explication and clinical illustrations which make them more real and convincing. On occasion one is left thinking ‘is that really what I understand, or believe?’ and, after further thought, forced to agree that ‘indeed it is’ - not an uncommon experience when one hears non-analytic scientists propound psychoanalysis. Perhaps something in the clinical experience modifies the concepts, subtly and consistently.
Paul Kline is Reader in Psychometrics at the University of Exeter, and has published many psychological studies of Freudian theory. His attitude to psychoanalysis is clearly sympathetic but his sympathy is tempered by experimental psychological attitudes and assumptions. He argues convincingly that psychoanalytic theory consists of a series of hypotheses (or inspired h