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Within the small compass of this volume there is contained much wisdom—or if that be too strong a word, at the least much food for profitable thought. Dr. Money-Kyrle was among the first (though not quite the first) to endeavour to make more or less generalized applications of psycho-analytic findings to ethical and social problems. In recent years there has appeared quite a number of volumes devoted to this subject. In the present book, however, he still maintains a kind of priority, inasmuch as he differs from the previous authors in making his approach largely from the point of view of Kleinian psychology. The evaluation of his work will thus inevitably to some extent be affected by the reader's estimate of the contributions made by Mrs. Klein and those who follow her. But whatever be the judgement on certain specific points there can be no doubt that in making the attempt he has forged another helpful link between what were formerly the separate disciplines of child psychology and social psychology—the kind of link in making which Freud himself excelled and to which is due so much of the wide illumination cast by psycho-analysis on human problems generally.
But at least two other factors have contributed largely to the author's viewpoint: his early philosophical training and his experience as a member of the German Personnel Research Branch (the 'spiritual creation' of Dr. H. V. Dicks) which did valuable work both in social survey and in personnel selection in the British Zone of Germany after the war. In virtue of the former, Money-Kyrle has become dissatisfied with the stand of ethical relativism which is so frequently adopted (often, as he freely admits, as a valuable safeguard against bias) in social science; while the latter drove home to him the lesson, already learnt from psycho-analysis, of the existence of a correspondence between upbringing and character, in the sense of a positive correlation between stern discipline in youth and an attitude of