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The author tells us this book 'had to be written', but it is not clear to whom it is addressed: for the informed layman it is too complicated
and misleading; for students of psychoanalysis it is too controversial; for the experienced psychoanalyst the contention with Freud is too heavily larded with what has been many times presented. But the book can be read selectively with profit, for where the author presents clinical observations this volume has something to offer.
The introduction tells of 'the need for a theory of personality'. It is stated that our debt to Freud is 'immeasurable', but that our knowledge of human nature does not begin nor end with Freud and that 'human behavior, despite his great pioneering work, is still largely unpredictable, though somewhat less so than it was in the days before Freud'. A debt to Sullivan is more warmly expressed and we are told of his 'two important contributions': 1, 'the idea that human personality is essentially a social product'; 2, 'his insistence that the central, nuclear factor in human psychology is self-esteem'. The author would like 'to synthesize and reconcile' Freud's and Sullivan's 'apparently antagonistic psychologies' and begins with an attack on Freud's concept that the energy of the ego derives from the id. On the ground that 'a theory of instinctual energies is after all a Weltanschauung', and that there is no reason for not postulating any number of energies, 'since here all is postulation', he proposes to 'assume that the ego possesses an energy of its own … whose main characteristic is that it drives toward survival'. This may be a philosophical but it is not a scientific methodology—if only because it does not meet the rule of economy of hypothesis.
The author then moves 'toward a theory of personality and neurosis'. Some pages are devoted to conjecture regarding physiologic and psychic homeostasis—a very scientific term used throughout in place of equilibrium, balance or adjustment—of the fo