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There would be no occasion to review this book here except for the chapter by Dr. Ernest Jones on "The Concept of a Normal Mind". This chapter would distinguish any book. It is the ablest exposition of certain fundamental mental hygiene principles that has appeared in English since Freud's essay on living beyond one's psychological
means in Reflections (translated by A. A. Brill and Alfred B. Kuttner: N. Y., Moffat, Yard & Co., 1922).
From common definitions of "normality" Jones selects the attributes of happiness, efficiency in mental functioning, and a positive social feeling-relationship as elements in a possible normality and, examining these psychoanalytically, finds that underlying failure in each is anxiety due to the inability of the individual to suffer deprivation. He surmises "that the psychological problem of normality must ultimately reside in the capacity to endure—in the ability to hold wishes in suspension without either renouncing them or 'reacting' to them in defensive ways". The nearest obtainable criterion of normality, Jones states, may be fearlessness and the most normal person may be, like Siegfried, angstfrei, "but it must be understood that by this is meant not merely manifest courage but the absence of all the deep reactions that mask unconscious apprehensiveness".
The stressing of this point is important. It is a point familiar to psychoanalysts, but one that has been almost wholly ignored by mental hygienists. On the whole mental hygienists and, even more so, people generally are quite satisfied if individuals are "happy, efficient in mental functioning, and with a positive social-relationship feeling". Until mental hygienists realize that this is not adequate and understand why it is inadequate they are not in a position to make a beginning. The editor of this particular book and a number of his contributors, who seem to write from a psychoanalytic point-of-view, are evidently not familiar with that part of psychoanalytic knowle