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This book is not intended to be a textbook of psychoanalysis, but to deal with precision and completeness with the psychoanalytic doctrine regarding instincts, according to accepted freudian theories. It is chiefly a study of the impacts of human instincts on
diverse fields of individual and collective psychology, with special consideration to prophylactic and educational measures as well as to the methods by which the instincts may be controlled, guided and diverted to more useful ends.
The most important items with which the author deals in the thirty-two chapters of the book are in the first part: infancy in relation to environment and fundamental instincts, sublimation, the various evolutionary phases of the instincts, the formation of the superego, the structure of the whole personality. In the second part the author describes chiefly the disturbances of the development of instincts and their consequences, fixation and regression of the instinctual trends, inhibition and anxiety, pathogenesis of the principal forms of neurosis and homosexuality, the neurotic character, psychoses and delinquency. The third part is given especially to education of the instincts, the author dealing with the discharging and damming up of instinctual impulses, with the problem of religion and the attitudes of parents and educators towards the psychosexual evolutional phases through the crisis of puberty and beyond.
Various personal contributions of Flescher to the themes discussed are highly interesting and persuasive. First of all, we draw attention to the manner in which Flescher approaches religion, without attempting to solve it, from the ontological point of view, but indicating its importance in education, following methods and ways which differ—and differ rightly, we believe—from Freud's viewpoint. Also where the author—like Meng and others—emphasizes the tendency to perfection, which he justifies metapsychologically, we are in complete accord. His phylogenetic explana