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For a long time psycho-analysts, following the lead of Freud himself, were content to carry on their work without much concern for the wider social, moral and philosophic issues raised by their discoveries. From various sides they were branded first as immoralists and later as reactionaries, but it is only in recent years that they themselves (perhaps not uninfluenced by that attitude of increasing social responsibility shown by scientists in some other fields) have manifested any considerable interest in problems of Lebensanschauung, in the contributions which psycho-analysis could make towards the alleviation of our social discontents, and in the general ethical background of psycho-analytic theory and practice. To a large extent Dr. Brierley's book can be considered as an addition to other recent attempts, such as those of Odier, Richard, Fromm, Money-Kyrle, Waddington et al., Blanco White and the present reviewer, to place psycho-analysis in a larger social and ethical setting and thus to indicate its rôle in the general trend of contemporary thought and action.
The book is extraordinarily rich in its thought-provoking qualities; we can open it at almost any page and find thereon food for reflection and indications of lines along which further research and theory might profitably follow. Its clarity and orderliness are perhaps not quite on a par with its suggestiveness—and this is no doubt to some extent a consequence of the composition, for it is made up of revisions, elaborations and amalgamations of a number of articles which have appeared (with one exception) in this Journal between 1934 and 1947. Since there was some considerable overlap in the subject matter of the articles, there is admittedly and perhaps inevitably, a certain amount of repetition in the book and a return to the same themes in different contexts and from different approaches, a procedure which has its value as a thought-provoking device and as a restraint against oversimplification, bu