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The author, a professor of psychology at the University of California, attempts in this short book to analyze the nature of war and its psychological causes and to provide a method for the prevention of its recurrence. In an interesting foreword he relates the development of his strong pacifistic orientation. His thesis is
that former ages have stressed limited and secondary areas of man's total personality such as spirituality, intellect and economics. The time has come for a new ideology or myth about the nature of man which Professor Tolman proposes to call The Psychologically Adjusted Man. In this myth is encompassed 'the understanding of man's total psychology with the resultant balanced statisfaction of all his absolutely necessary psychological needs leading to relatively universal individual happiness and welfare'.
He begins by reporting experiments on laboratory animals dealing with some of the basic biological drives. One noteworthy feature about this presentation is the differentiation of the drives into appetites and aversions. Tolman says that the former are set off by internal metabolic conditions; the latter—of which aggression is one—by evoking environmental situations such as injury, obstruction, isolation.
This is followed by a chapter on the social techniques of the same animals. He lists four major types of social techniques: self-assertive, self-abasive, collective and collective-assertive.
From this point the exposition makes two leaps from the experimental animal to the human individual and society. First, by analogy, the four types of social techniques among the animals observed are correlated with different types of human society. The second jump leaves the laboratory animal and leads to a discussion of some of the classical ego defenses first described by Freud. The purpose of this is to demonstrate their function in the conversion of biological drives, or in mediating between biological drives and the various social techniques.
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