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Originally published in 1947, there is no essential change in the exposition of this second edition which is in clear, nontechnical terms. Thirteen supplementary pages offer a reformulation of psychodynamics. Topical subheadings under the original 1947 chapter titles have added little. Most important to this reviewer is the fact that, aside from brief references in the new preface, no meaningful bibliography has been added in the interim of thirteen years, a period of significant psychoanalytic refinement of ego psychology.
Saul, long known for his lucid expository style, his interest in preventive psychiatry, and his psychoanalytic collaboration with the original Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, intended this book not only for psychiatrists but for 'all who deal with people and strive to make human life more livable'. Probably it is as timely now in a world of competition with missiles for space as after the cessation of World War II. Saul believes in expressing motivational forces in everyday language and has much to say on emotional maturity and its lack. He makes much use in his book of clinical interviews, particularly with victims of combat fatigue. The book strikingly resembles Grinker and Spiegel's Men Under Stress. The clinical interview seems to serve Saul as a miniature psychoanalysis; he places too much emphasis on the conscious aspects of ego functioning at the expense of exploring the unconscious aspects of the authoritative military setting. 'Hostility' is preferred to the aggressive drives as a central motivating force of personality. This preference infiltrates the author's concepts of maturity. Hostility is an evidence of immaturity and is largely a matter of poor upbringing of children. The insights of military neuropsychiatry therefore lead Saul to exhort us to seek what we should now call corrective emotional experience in family life; this experience can, he optimistically believes, bring a good, essentially nonhostile, mature world