A Dynamic Theory of Personality

By Kurt Lewin. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1935. 286 pp.

THE PRINCIPLES OF TOPOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY. By Kurt Lewin. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1936. 231 pp.

The first of the two books mentioned is a collection of translations of articles that have appeared during a number of years in the German psychological literature. It is a somewhat popular survey of the experimental work of the author and others in the field of what used to be called "the psychology of the will". These studies are interesting to psychoanalysts because of their point of view and method which is definitely dynamic. A favorite experimental procedure which admits of many variations is to interrupt or put obstacles in the way of some activity in order to observe the subsequent fate of the urge behind the interrupted activity or the reactions of the experimental subject to various sorts of frustration.

Thus Zeigarnik1 showed that one tends to have a better memory for activities that have been started but not completed than for activities that have been brought to completion; Ovsianskina2 studied in some detail conditions that determine whether or not an activity that has been interrupted will be resumed and Dembo3 made experimental analyses of considerable thoroughness of reactions in frustration and anger.

The conclusions from these experiments so far have been for the most part attempts at more precise formulation of facts that are matters of everyday psychological knowledge. This is, of course, what every science must do at the beginning. Moreover a number of the questions which Kurt Lewin and his coworkers are attempting to answer experimentally suggest problems with very stimulating implications for psychoanalysts.

One of the most fundamental mechanistic concepts in psychoanalysis is that of substitution or displacement. Representation by symbols, all the displacement mechanisms in dream work and symptom formation, sublimation, even projection and introjection,