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The author introduces her book by stating her orientation towards the problem of neurosis, with emphasis upon her deviations from Freud's concepts. These are the following: she does not consider the actual conflicts of the patient as a mere repetition of infantile emotional situations because the relations between childhood experiences and the later life situation is more intricate than 'is assumed by those psychoanalysts who proclaim a simple cause and effect relationship'; furthermore she believes in the primary importance of cultural influences upon the development of neuroses as compared with biological determinants; and finally she stresses the central rôle that anxiety plays in neuroses.
The first two points (the relation of infantile experiences to the actual life situation and the relation of sociological to biological factors) immediately arouse the reader's interest because here the author raises two issues in which psychoanalytic theory needs further thorough investigation. The third point, the recognition of anxiety as the dynamic center of repression, of defense mechanisms and consequently of neurosis, is of course the essence of Freud's contributions in the last eleven years.
The book deals with the first two problems more summarily and mainly in the form of reasoning, whereas the most valuable part of this book is undoubtedly the author's well digested observations and comments concerning the psychology of anxiety, the fruits of rich clinical experience, of an independent, scrutinizing mind.
One welcomes the emphasis on the fact that behind the great variety of neurotic phenomena and neurotic personalities there can be recognized a few common emotional conflict situations which appear in variations in different clinical pictures. Yet after reading this book one remains in the same ignorance as before regarding the question whether these universal features of neurotic personalities represent certain fundamental patterns of human nature, or are due to