You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book, with an introduction by L. W. Grensted, D.D., consists of nine chapters, the first six of which constitute a significant summary of modern psychological teachings from the point of view of the achievement of personality.
The psychological chapters first dispose of behaviourism from the teleological point of view with which psycho-analysis is familiar. There
follow chapters upon the psychology of Freud, Adler and Jung, which she describes as psychology stressing respectively the need for love, the need for significance and the need for security. There follows a chapter upon moral conflict, in which the point is made that Freud is pessimistic concerning the possibility of achieving love, Adler feels that the human being is truly insignificant and Jung finds humanity in such great insecurity as to suggest a necessity for a religious faith, which he apparently feels is a myth. The writer endeavours to solve the impasse by stressing what she feels is slighted by these three writers, the importance for personality of other persons in the environment and the fact that personality is worthless without human relationship. She suggests that successful psycho-therapy depends upon the possibility that the patient may find love, significance and security in the therapist as a human being or through therapy may become able to find this relationship with some other human being. She attributes many of the failures of psycho-therapy to the lack of a suitable person for the patient to love. She feels that loving and giving is as important as being loved and that the value of such love depends in part upon the real value of the beloved. These chapters impress the reviewer as the most dispassionate and authentic he has seen in a book of this character.
The last three chapters make an heroic and dignified effort to introduce the principle that the need of a human being for love, significance and security implies the existence in the universe of a Lover. The effort to e