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This work is in three parts. Part I, entitled 'Undercurrents of Individual Psychology', is by far the largest and consists of an attractive, beguilingly simple account of the unconscious mind, personality structure, and emotional development. It is a pleasant and admirably clear introduction to psycho-analytical concepts which should be not only illuminating to the lay reader but also of use to the analytically sophisticated who, in the course of their work, have to explain psycho-analytical concepts using as few technical terms as possible. In reading this book they will learn how to do it.
Part II, 'Danger Points in Group Psychology', outlines the role of the unconscious in social behaviour and then proceeds through a consideration of the group as a regressive force to a description of how that group known as the Sovereign State evokes such regression and, in the absence of democratic institutions, militates towards those episodic fulminations of outwardly directed violence known as war. The regressive phenomena which cause all the best that has been achieved so slowly and painfully to disintegrate catastrophically occur more readily under the impact of authoritarian leadership. War has become so unrestricted and no longer can be confined to those who choose to be involved in it that something will have to be done, and that urgently, if those things which we value, and even our physical beings, are to survive. This leads on to the third part of Mrs. Strachey's book.
In Part III, 'Recommendations', the author recommends changes in the State which, in brief, consist of an increase in the sort of democracy which we know in Britain and America—to mention but two of the Western nations. This consists in a curbing of autocratic leadership and in peripheralizing rather than centralizing government, restricting the powers of those leaders in whose personalities despotism is malignantly ingrained. Pari passu with this process of decentralization she recommends that b