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It is a chastening experience for a psycho-analyst to read this book; chastening both because its conspectus is so much broader than that to which he is accustomed in the consulting-room, and because the psycho-analytic standpoint seems to play so relatively minor a role in the thinking of the very eminent psychologist who is its author.
Murphy's courageous, ambitious, and timely aim is to consider the future potentialities of man, or rather to outline a system within which it would be possible to attempt such a consideration. His theoretical standpoint is that of Lewin's field theory of interaction between organism and environment, with the result that he holds that it is not possible to make long-range predictions of what human nature will be like in the future. This broad conclusion is in general convincing, particularly if one inclines to the anti-historicist position of Popper.
At times, however, Murphy seems to take this conclusion too far, as when he suggests that we can have no reliable ideas of what men will be like in the not too distant future. This follows from his relative lack of concern with the biological basis of human nature; and this is the reviewer's major criticism. In psycho-analytic terms, he seems to see the ego as potentially much more independent of the id than seems likely. The question arises too whether field theory, which sees human nature in terms of interaction between organism and environment, can accommodate the unconscious which is cut off from two-way interaction with the internal 'environment' of the ego as well as with the external one by the barrier of repression. Certainly Murphy does not discuss this aspect of interaction between the human organism and its environment.
He does, of course, acknowledge the importance of psycho-analytic contributions to the understanding of human nature, even though, in his preface, he includes psycho-analysis along with other themes such as atomic energy and its uses, world government, the n