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It is not very difficult to satisfy Professor Wallin as to the etiology and therapy of 'mental maladjustments'. One may discern this in the following captions which the author has attached to autobiographical case studies of normal people: 'Fear of the dark and of being grabbed, continuing at thirty-three; possibly due to hearing a newspaper being snatched from the porch, and to being scared by a
robber.' 'Fear of electrical storms attributed to mother's fear; overcome apparently by faith in Bible teaching that a protector watches over us.' 'Fear of death due to unwillingness to face the disagreeable.' 'Fear of traffic accidents with sensations of injury apparently leading to a tendency to avoid going out; possibly due to prophecy of fortune teller and vivid imagination.' 'Inexplicable dread of being alone in a building driving the respondent to inspect room after room before locking herself in the last room; possibly caused by a fright in early childhood occasioned by some happening behind her back.' 'Fear of being kidnapped by gypsies ascribed to tales of kidnapping; concealed terror of having leprosy and tuberculosis due to trivial causes; deadly fear of country drying up and death from famine due to a protracted dry spell.'
The author has an abiding faith in the ability of the average individual to discover the causes of his difficulties. To be sure, it is 'freely admitted that the causal explanations offered by the respondents are sometimes incorrect', but after all 'the formation of character traits is often a relatively simple matter of conditioning, instead of the obscure, mysterious process posited by some of the metaphysical obscurantists in the field of psychopathology'. 'In the appraisal of psychogenic factors of maladjustment the student should so far as possible adhere to the law of parsimony according to which the fewest, simplest and most natural explanations that will account for all the facts should be preferred…' A glance at the caption