Personality Maladjustments and Mental Hygiene: By J. E. Wallace Wallin. Second Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1949. 581 pp.

Wallin, who since the beginning of this century has been engaged in the teaching of psychology, especially as it relates to education, presents the second and revised edition of his text first published in 1935. The material for this book was gathered primarily from

lectures on mental hygiene and personality maladjustment offered to lay and student audiences. For exemplification, the book is studded with excerpts from personality inventories requested of graduate students in education. This revised edition (enlarged by five chapters) ambitiously presents new sections on the atomic age, the psychology of dictators, the endocrine glands, projective techniques, etc.

In general, the book consists of a didactic presentation of what constitutes ideal mental health, the deviations from this, and their cause and cure according to the author's own views and concepts. There is an introduction consisting of six chapters, chiefly concerned with currently held concepts of mental hygiene and their ramifications in education and sociology. Included here also are some of the highly condensed (and of dubious value) 'new sections': two pages on projective techniques, one page on the atomic age, seven pages on a variety of endocrine disorders, and a page devoted to Hitler and Mussolini. The second part of the book consists of eleven chapters principally dealing with defense mechanisms. Though the last five chapters are supposedly devoted to psychoanalysis, the author, in his preface, apologizes for their inclusion and suggests that they can 'be omitted without serious damage to the earlier chapters'.

In this reviewer's opinion, the author strives to be a good 'middle-of-the-road' eclectic, but it is doubtful that any particular 'school' would want to claim him; for this dainty dish consists of the four and twenty blackbirds of will, behaviorism, conditioning, habit, constitution, psychobiology, unconscious motivation, etc., rolled into a rather indigestible pie. Almost reluct