The Psychology of Human Conflict: By Edwin R. Guthrie. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938. 408 pp.

The trend of this work is revealed in the summary:

• 1Intense and prolonged stimuli disturb the organism and result in excitement and heightened activity.

• 2The animal responds to these and other stimuli encountered with whatever responses have been previously learned.

• 3Every series of movement tends to be fixed as a habit and to be repeated if once started.

• 4Excitement brings increased activity and this brings stimuli in new orders. Responses tend to become more varied.

• 5Each response as it occurs is associated with the drive but loses this association to the next response.

• 6Eventually a response (consummatory response) removes the drive. For this in turn the drive becomes an associative cue.'

Here may be discerned the influence of Thorndike as well as of W. B. Cannon and E. J. Kempf. The author's descriptive psychology is that of Janet who, he complains, 'has been neglected in the United States because of the momentum and popular appeal of the psychoanalytic movement'. One is at least mildly surprised to learn that Janet has explored the field of unconscious desires 'much more thoroughly than any of the psychoanalysts'. How little the author himself understands 'unconscious desires' may be gathered from the following quotation: 'Brothers and sisters do not normally develop such [erotic] interest in each other… Incest … would be very rare even if no social tabus enforced it with punishment and social disapproval. The reason for the rare occurence of incest is that in human beings attitudes towards other members of the household are established before sexual maturity and before erotic drive attains its full effectiveness.'

One might have no quarrel with Guthrie's description of the process of learning and habit adjustment if he did not attempt to explain by its means the most diverse phenomena—interests, motivation, personality, 'the nervous breakdown', phobias,