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'The Salmon Memorial Committee have suggested that thirty years of experience in dealing with the problems which developing personalities present must have brought many issues into focus and crystallized some conceptions of essential structurings… What have I learned, they ask, through daily exploring the foundations of personality and behavior with preventive and therapeutic aims in mind, and with the frequent opportunity for observing the results of efforts at treatment?' Personality is defined as 'an integrated system of habitual adjustments to the environment, particularly to the social environment. Personality is the individual's specific and ordinarily exhibited attitudes, characteristics, and behavior tendencies. Whatever there may possibly be in personality manifestations which an individual quite privately keeps to himself, on the whole our specific judgment concerning his personality is built up on how he appears and behaves in the eyes of others. Personality is the individual's social stimulus value.'
That the scientific study of personality cannot be confined within the limits of this definition is implicitly understood by the author. His point of view through the years has been an eclectic one, to judge from the evidence of the material that goes to make up this book. It seems that Dr. Healy, with his intense scientific curiosity, has at one time or another attempted to use and evaluate practically all the systems that have been put forward for the study of personality, from mental-testing to Jung's psychological types. The latter he had regretfully to give up because of the lack of any practical clinical value. The importance of heredity, constitution, environment, endocrine factors, metabolism, particularly as related to energy potential and energy output, are some of the factors discussed. His definition of constitution is the 'realized organism at each stage of its development—it is not, as is so often supposed, a fixed thing, but varies th