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This is an unusual type of book, an anthology on the grand scale, which should provoke useful discussion and stimulate research. The author remarks in his Preface that our knowledge of thinking is 'scant' and this volume should help to amplify it. It is a source book of material bearing on the organization and pathology of thought and, although it does not pretend to be complete, the author's selection has two great merits. Firstly, he has not limited himself to a single avenue of approach but has included papers by psychologists, psychiatrists, and psycho-analysts. Secondly, he has chosen a number of papers not readily accessible to the English-speaking public; many appear in English translation for the first time.
The author has not only had to select his papers but also the relevant parts of many of the chosen papers and to omit passages with less bearing on the central theme. The reader may sometimes regret the omissions, particularly in the case of papers translated for the first time, but a summary of the omitted parts is often given in the running commentary which accompanies the papers. This method may incur some criticism, as the flow of the text is constantly interrupted by footnotes, but any reader who finds this aggravating can ignore the commentary on first reading and return to it later. It would be a mistake for him to ignore the commentary altogether, as it is an integral part of the book and a preparation for the final chapter in which the author tries to extract the common theoretical implications and to foreshadow a more comprehensive theory.
The list of papers with their sub-headings is too long to quote; it will be enough to say that they fall into five groups: directed thinking, symbolism, motivation of thinking, fantasy thinking, and pathology of thinking. The Introduction should on no account be missed, since it contains a full explanation of the author's aims and methods and an account of the various difficulties he had to face. Ther