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The material in this volume constituted lectures given to small groups of senior medical students at Norristown State Hospital where the author is Superintendent. These lectures, with certain modifications, were put into book form in 1934 at the request of some of the students. This is the second edition.
It is evident from reading this volume that the author is familiar with the literature of modern psychology. He approaches his subject with sympathy and a genuine desire to understand mental mechanisms. But it appears that he has not completely digested the material he read. He remains eclectic and sceptical of the value of any one point of view. The teachings of Freud, Rank, Jung, Stekel, Adler, Adolf Meyer and many others are interchangeably used without any attempt at orienting the reader as to who is who and why. This is most bewildering and gives one the impression that the author is no less bewildered than the reader. He seems on the defensive and always in doubt, at no time committing himself to a clear-cut categorical statement. Everything is qualified by 'sometime', 'rarely', 'often', etc.
In his discussion of psychoanalysis, the author displays thinly veiled hostility. The subject is covered in ten pages, and while he accords psychoanalysis a place as a method of research and as a science of the unconscious, he feels that it has completely failed as a therapeutic method. He admits, however, that it has 'elucidated many aspects of human behavior that had baffled interpretation. It has lead to a greater realization that dreams, fantasies, the play of children, casual gestures and slips of the tongue afford significant clues to an understanding of personality' (p. 368).
While he states that the greatest value of psychoanalysis is in the psychoneuroses, he does not recommend it in hysteria and feels it is inefficacious in what he calls "neurasthenia and psychasthenia'. He does not mention it as a method of choice in the anxieties. He leans very str