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The publisher offers this book to the public with the comment: '… it would be difficult to find a more satisfactory exposition of the fundamentals that psychoanalysis has been aiming at for many years'. Contradicting this pretentious comment the author writes in his introduction: 'My thinking and reading have convinced me that many of the accepted psychological theories are unnecessarily cumbersome, especially where the conception is involved of an almost autonomous, mysterious region of the mind called the "subconscious". My conviction is that what we most signally lack is a more adequate theory of consciousness …'
It is the author's liberty to develop a theory of consciousness if he so wishes, but to offer as a fundamental of psychoanalysis any theory which essentially rejects the 'unconscious' and regards it coldly as a mysterious region of the mind is license.
The body of the book elaborates themes such as secondary gain through illness, superiority feelings, avoiding responsibility, and so on, all without appreciation of basic dynamics of neurotic mechanisms.