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Conceive a very scrappy note-book of a medical student with crudely coloured diagrams, incomplete sentences, mis-spellings and misunderstandings, and you will have a good idea of this book.
The first forty-one pages give in tabloid form the histology, embryology, physiology and chemistry of the organism, followed by the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system and the functions of the ductless glands. Normal and morbid psychology are compressed into the next seventy pages, and the volume ends with a not too accurate account of the various mental diseases.
While the anxiety neurosis is explained in terms of the vegetative nervous system and vagotonia, there is no reference to atrophy of the sex glands in dementia præcox.
'If there were no intrapsychic conflicts there would be no mind.' 'Personality depends chiefly upon the inherent properties of nerve cells' and mental deficiency is 'due to malformation of the cells of the nervous system'.
The author, while apparently sympathetic towards psycho-analysis, gives no coherent account of it, but merely a collection of sentimental statements, a curious one of which is 'No one should dare to practise psycho-analysis before, if he be a man, the age of fifty, if a woman, that of forty'.