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.
This is an encyclopedic volume of nine hundred ninety-nine pages, a bibliography of seven hundred forty-nine titles, and more than a thousand textual references given by page, paragraph and line. It is only fair, therefore, to state at the outset that 'lest the reader [to quote Professor Murphy's own words] waste time upon what he does not want, it must be emphasized that this is not a book on diagnosis or therapy or upon any type of clinical approach'. I may further add it is not a book on personality in the sense which one ordinarily associates a book of this title, but rather a study of how personality comes to be or, again to quote the author, 'an attempt at evaluation of data on how personality grows'.
What Professor Murphy has done in this volume has been to bring together all of the relevant facts and basic theories of the problem of what makes not only Sammy but all of us run. It is a gigantic achievement, and I dare say only a person of Professor Murphy's erudition could have done it. His basic material is necessarily drawn from various branches of psychology, but it also derives much from anthropology, physiology, psychoanalysis and sociology. Its encyclopedic character is at once its strength and its weakness. No one person can be expected to deal effectively with such manifold sources, and certainly no one reviewer could deal