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The author's purpose in this book is to contribute to a philosophy of the family, to assist through education in the preparation for marriage and family life, and to be of value in the training of teachers and social workers. It is based on the philosophical principles of John Dewey.
History and anthropology, sociology and economics, biology and psychology are searched for information into the realities of family life and for techniques for providing desirable changes. The use of 'Cooperative experimental intelligence in social affairs' is held out as an imperative need. 'The cooperative family' is the goal to be achieved. In this 'Manliness with its emphasis on protective strength, reliability and courage is the correlative of womanliness from which all traces of immature dependence has gone, but where the emphasis is still upon the qualities conducive to the care of life'.
Psycho-analysis comes in for considerable explicit discussion and is relied on implicitly to a far greater extent.
Dr. Sait quotes Dewey, 'Some psychoanalysts treat sex in a way which flagrantly exhibits both the consequences of artificial simplification and transformation of social results into psychic causes'. She criticizes further, 'In particular there has been neglect on the part of Freud and some of his followers of the cultural determination of sexual behavior'.
Malinowski, whose functional view of culture the author adopts, is noted 'to have shown the Oedipus complex to be a by-product, not a creative principle, but a maladjustment'.
Many of the points that Dr. Sait raises are the subjects of current re-examination and re-evaluation among psycho-analysts. In her advocacy of certain therapeutic procedures she shews, however, her failure to differentiate between psycho-analytical hypothesis and clinical fact. Thus she discusses the treatment of problems of marital maladjustment. 'Social psychology supplements the somewhat one-sided view of many psycho-analysts by stressing behavior as t