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Effective help presupposes that the helper understand the situation which he intends to change for the better. Only a good diagnostician can be a really good therapist, although the public thinks differently especially when a state of emergency demands immediate and thorough help. Most advice given in sociological problems is still of the nature of quick remedies by too eager therapists who promise too much and attempt to act before they have really
grasped the situation. Jones is of the opinion that 'social therapists' should first of all study psychology, against which they actually show the most intense resistance. The reviewer would be inclined to add that unfortunately most psychologists show a corresponding resistance against sociological studies. In Jones's ensuing discussion, examples are quoted to indicate the importance of individual psychological conflicts for events in society, with little attention to the fact that the conflicts of the individual in turn depend on the social institutions under which they are living. Jones explains that human actions are rooted in human wishes, that some human wishes give rise to anxiety, and that people develop mechanisms to fight this anxiety, especially those of introjection and projection. These mechanisms falsify reality-testing by creating, for example, the tendency to believe that certain persons, nations, or ideas are 'wholly good', or 'wholly bad'. The absoluteness of some political doctrines makes the psychiatrist suspicious. Jones goes on to review Freud's ideas about the relations between the leader and the led, showing that the power with which leaders are endowed through the psychological needs of those they lead creates a danger of 'paternal benevolence in a ruler deteriorating, either temporarily or permanently, into inhumanity and ruthlessness'. As a remedy against this danger, Jones suggests 'that in a sane society a leader would be required to pass certain elementary psychoanalytic tests, i