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Marking a happy mixture of theory and data, this book addresses itself to the measurement and understanding of human motivation. Psychoanalysts are at times indifferent to academic discussions of motivation, and understandably, but they will appreciate the degree to which the contributors to this volume are indebted to Freud.
In an excellent introductory essay, Gardner Lindzey raises the questions to be discussed, summarizes the succeeding papers, delineates the areas of agreement and disagreement, and brings the book to some degree of coherence. He is constantly aware of the differences which characterize the work of the academic psychologist and the clinician, and he notes that the psychometrician and the psychoanalyst deal with rather different kinds of observational data.
Although Lindzey attempts to focus the discussions by posing nine basic issues, few of the contributors concern themselves with these issues and few are in agreement when they are discussing the same topic. Several of the writers approach the study of motivation in terms of cognitive variables, even when questioning the traditional distinction between cognitive, conative, and affective processes.
In a discussion of the therapeutic process, George A. Kelly dismisses psychoanalysis as 'a crumbling stockade of proprietary dogmatism' which is impeding progress in psychology during the second half of the twentieth century. Kelly suggests that the personal constructs employed by the individual to bring order or meaning to his phenomenal world provide the key to the study of his behavior. Among the other papers which the psychoanalytic reader will find of special interest are Regression in the Service of the Ego, by Roy Schafer, The Psychoanalytic Interview as an Observational Method,