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.
Here is what its author regards as a text-book of 'scientific psychology'. The student of its seven hundred pages will be inclined to grant that it is a scientific text-book, since it contains lengthy accounts of the anatomy and physiology of the central nervous system, of the functioning of the special sense organs, of the endocrine glands, of the behaviour responses in foetal guinea-pigs, of the retinal and postural factors in localizing movements, and of countless other pre-eminently scientific subjects. But whether it is a text-book of psychology may be considered a more open question, and it might even be argued that its author proceeds to extreme lengths in order to avoid contact with the painful subject of the human mind.
Of his seven hundred pages Professor Cole devotes twenty to what he hopes in his preface is a 'reasonably sympathetic' account of psycho-analysis, in the course of which he remarks that 'the truth is that the psycho-analytic gospel is more of a cult than a scientific view' and that psycho-analysts 'as dream interpreters can claim little superiority to the ancient soothsayers'. Actually these twenty pages are occupied with very brief sketches of Freud's views on the theory of instincts, of dreams and of mental topography, against all of which the author produces a number of arguments largely of the logical type. What is striking indeed both about the author's account of Freud's work and about his criticism of it is precisely their theoretical character. Not only is he innocent of any real approach to the clinical findings upon which Freud's generalizations are based, but he hardly even seems aware that a clinical side to the subject exists. It seems as though, like many academic psychologists, he finds it