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The sub-title and preface of this book give promise of some account of cases illustrating the mental factor in disease where it is unsuspected by the average general practitioner. In this, however, we are disappointed, for we are treated to a purely academic and rather vague dissertation on certain aspects of medical psychology in general.
The author has been greatly impressed by some theses by Child and Coghill, who insist that the organism and its behaviour are each to be regarded as an integrated whole, and not as a mere aggregation of constituent parts. We have not seen the original papers, but the notion as here presented does not strike us as arresting in originality; yet the first five chapters are largely based on this thought.
The words 'conflict' and 'ambivalence' are used in a new sense, more or less synonymous with action and reaction in physics and similar opposites in biology and physiology.
The latter half of the book (Chapters VII. to XII.) is an exposition of psycho-analytical principles along somewhat popular lines. Incidentally,