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By 'conscious orientation' the author refers to the quality of awareness experienced by the individual towards the outside world and towards his own inner life. He attempts to arrange the varieties of awareness into an array of types, following principally Jung's rubrics of extraverted, introverted, instinctive, intuitive, thinking and feeling. He recognizes the improbability of the existence of any of these types in pure culture, as it were, and lists a number of factors which may give rise to variations within a given type. Among these is the freudian 'complex'.
The major portion of the book is given over to an effort to apply the results of this exercise in typology to the task of understanding mental ailments of every variety. To the present reviewer, this endeavor results in an extreme confusion in which the manipulation of verbiage takes the place of productive thought. As to fundamental viewpoint, it is difficult to tell whether the author means to say that certain mental ailments are the outcome of certain corresponding types of 'conscious orientation', or that the various mental disease entities may supervene in any of these types, in which case the clinical picture will vary depending upon which type the given individual may belong to.
As may have already been gathered, this reviewer does not regard the book as having value for the clinician.