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This is a long book, and a tedious one. Those who have read Dr. Harrington's earlier book1 will miss here the quality of high writing with which he conducted that auto-da-fé of psychoanalysis; for here he has set out upon the arduous task of fulfilling his promise to provide an alternative to psychoanalysis, a task necessarily endowed with less pungency and glow than his earlier one, besides being somewhat more clinically exacting.
The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, First Principles, the author disposes of the problem of consciousness by assigning to it the rôle of an ineffectual epiphenomenon. By comparing the human organism with the automobile (a favorite and most belabored analogy) and likening consciousness to the sounds issuing from the motor and the readings of the various gauges, the author finds it unutterably silly to waste time in studying the latter group of epiphenomena when one has merely to lift the hood and confront the real mechanism.
What is our disappointment in Part II, Psycho-physiology, when our author, having lifted the hood with a flourish, begins to complain that he cannot get his head inside, that the darkness renders visibility well nigh impossible, that his attempts at exploration are further hampered by the heavy mittens he must wear, and that, in short, he cannot make head or tail of the business under such trying conditions. At this point one is impelled feebly to suggest that it might be profitable to study the dashboard indicators and listen to the purring of the motor while waiting for the surrounding darkness to lift. But the author, nothing daunted, refuses still to occupy himself with epiphenomena. Reasserting his faith that there must be something going on under that hood, and warmed by another round of poxes on psychoanalysis, he sets forth boldly in the hope, presumably, that if he just takes one thing at a time and starts talking anyway, something might come of it.
By this time, of course, our gloomiest suspic