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These books can be read independently, but they are the first two in a projected series of five volumes, whose aim is to study the 'process of integration of behaviour by a detailed analysis of the thoughts and acts of one person during two years of psycho-analytic treatment'. The patient was analysed by a colleague. Anticipating the query 'Can anything be proved by one case?' the author writes, 'Our aim, really, is not to prove anything. We intend, rather, to illustrate a method by which anyone may check our conclusions on as many cases as he cares to study in this way' (p. 40).
In his Acknowledgements the author says that he owes most to Freud but has also been much influenced by long collaboration with Franz Alexander and by the work of Kurt Lewin, Pavlov, Kohler, and Tolman. Some of his views have already been published in papers, but here we have the systematic presentation of what is essentially a revised metapsychology, reformulated in terms largely derived from, and consonant with, modern experimental physiology, and 'field' and Gestalt concepts. One of the aims of the re-phrasing is to render some of the findings of psycho-analysis more amenable to experimental investigation and validation, though in these books theory is formulated in close and intimate relation with clinical material and illustrated by simple tables and diagrams.
Basic Postulates. It is not feasible in a review to give a detailed account of the author's thesis and the arguments for it, but an attempt will be made to indicate the kind of approach and a few of the correspondences and differences between some of the suggested hypotheses and our more customary formulations. The method used, 'analysis by comparison', mainly of dream with dream, affords 'a strictly empirical method for reconstructing the pattern of a patient's personality. … As our working hypothesis, we assume that rational behaviour, neuroses and dreams can be analysed into component factors that are in part common to a