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This book by Dr. Saul stresses the point that hostility is part of a basic biological adaptive mechanism which operates automatically to meet threats, irritations and frustrations by withdrawing from or destroying them (the fight-flight mechanism). Hostility becomes a disordered adaptive mechanism when it is generated from persisting warped childhood emotional patterns, causing threats and frustrations, and when it is misused for immature goals, replacing mature understanding and cooperation. Hostility is transmitted by contact from parents to children from generation to generation and is preventable only by cutting through this process of transmission. For Dr. Saul, man's hostility to man is humanity's central problem.
This book is devoted to a discussion of hostility, which the author feels has been a neglected topic and one which he correctly states was addressed by Freud only near the end of his life.
The book is divided into three sections of 18 chapters and an Epilogue. Section I, entitled Preparation and Preliminary Considerations, presents the dimensions of the problem; here man is contrasted to other animals in that man attacks his own kind to an extent and with a brutality far surpassing other animals.
The author next defines hostility as a tendency of an organism to do something injurious and harmful to another living organism or to itself. This is contrasted and compared to aggression, which need not be destructive and which is descriptive of behavior. Hostility is a psychological term primarily denoting attitude, feeling, and motivation. In humans, hostility is usually accompanied by the feeling or emotion of anger and hate.
One aspect of the many forms of man's hostility to man is understandable if it is seen as a symptom of a mechanism of adaptation run rampant, That is, the fight-flight mechanism, which was so essential to primitive man, continues as a sort of biological lag into our present settings. The mechanism is apt to outstrip its controls and be