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This book is even wider in scope than its title suggests, being an investigation of the question: 'What is the proper study of psychology?' Dr. Lafitte, who is a lecturer in psychology, comes out emphatically with the answer: 'The Person in his real, ordinary life situation.' 'The choice for psychology, then, ' he writes, 'is between working with easily verified but largely trivial or irrelevant propositions and working with complex propositions in the field of common experience, which are fully as empirical as any but much harder to verify.' This is a point of view which a psycho-analyst would readily endorse, but it is a delight to find it expounded with the erudition and force of reasoned argument of which Dr. Lafitte is capable. He emphasizes the uniqueness of the person, who is the cause of his own destiny and who can only be studied during action in real life by an observer who is himself to some degree involved. Much of Dr. Lafitte's basic approach shows the influence of existentialist thought.
The latter part of the book contains a discussion of the nature of psychological laws. He criticizes the fashionable mathematical analysis of fragmentary behaviour, and also the unjustified inferences that are often made from this to real behaviour.
Dr. Lafitte has an excellent hand of cards but tends at times to overplay it. for instance, although he is undeniably right in pointing out the danger of assuming that the psychology of the person can be explained in terms applicable to the physical sciences (psycho-analysis is criticized for this), he seems to underestimate the immense heuristic value which analogies from other fields of science can often have.
This book is an important one. It is an enlightened and powerful argument against the arid and artificial type of enquiry that constitutes so much of present-day psychology, and it contains constructive thought on the paths which might more profitably be open to the psychologist in the future.