You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
At the end of some absorbed hours reading this book, I found Edward Fitzgerald's lines were ringing in the brain behind my ears,
Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by that same door as in I went.
Dr Farrell, an Oxford philosopher, lets his readers in through the door of Jane Austen's sentiments as portrayed in Pride and Prejudice, and lets them out through the door of common sense with a concluding paragraph which begins unobjectionably with the sentence, ‘So, however feeble the psychology of commonsense may be, it still has its uses.’ Sadly, to my mind, his final two sentences belie much useful research in the rest of his book when he concludes, ‘For much of ordinary life it is quite unnecessary to bother ourselves about psychoanalysis, or any of the other psychodynamic psychologies that are on sale in the marketplace. The path of wisdom—for most of us most of the time—is to forget about them’. It would be very wrong to assume from this that Dr Farrell altogether under-rates the place of analysis.
He always writes engagingly, and in the early pages he carefully defines his limits in undertaking this work, and also defines the three ways in which he uses the word ‘psychoanalysis’. Then, in nine further chapters he treats successively the theory of his subject, the relation of analysis to science, the impact of case material and interpretations, the validity of the method, and the effectiveness of analytic therapy. He does no positive injustice to Jung's views. If anything Jung emerges less scathed than Freud from the encounter with Farrell.
It is unfortunate that he sees the disagreements between Freud and Jung as being mutually destructive of the validity of analysis. I had hoped that that point of view was, by common consent, at least thirty years out of date. Nor would one guess from reading this work that one of the most promising movements in the area of applied study of the ps