You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Textbooks of abnormal psychology designed for teaching college students are invariably eclectic. This is certainly one of the better ones. Its comprehensiveness should satisfy the most exacting demands, if that is properly a pedagogical objective. It may seem strange to raise such an issue, but if the prime purpose of teaching abnormal psychology is to give students a reasonably lucid approach to the vexing problems of human behavior, I wonder very much whether the result of condensing everything that is known about the field into one book, and presumably one course, is not to overwhelm them with a mass of intellectualizations. Equipped with a vast knowledge of their subject, the authors have soberly and honestly presented every aspect of the field from every prevalent point of view. This makes for intense condensation but it is difficult to see how it can avoid producing an impression of vagueness and tentativeness. That such an effect is no longer inevitable can be amply demonstrated in the satisfying manner in which illustrative material can be used for teaching purposes by psychiatrists with a reasonably accurate dynamic point of view.
Although the authors are careful to stress the dynamic nature of modern abnormal psychology, this is not evident in the scanty case histories presented. They are prevailingly descriptive. One misses the impact of well-understood precipitating situations, the sense of meaningfulness one may reveal even in a schizophrenic, the illumination of a life history by the application of psychoanalytic principles. It is not easy to forget the bitter opposition of academicians to a scientific discipline which so many of them do not understand, but whose findings they constantly apply unscientifically