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The essential claim of this ambitious work is that the failure of psychotherapy to 'achieve a reasonably potent and reliable practice based on explicit scientific principles' will not be remedied until the
terms anxiety and neurosis 'are operationally and meaningfully defined and measurable'. The authors accordingly present a series of measurement devices purporting to settle the questions of defining and quantitating the many variables which they assume determine the intensity of anxiety and neuroticism. Their metric method, they say, 'employs powerful, multivariate statistical techniques to analyze relationships between precise, standard, clinically meaningful measurements'.
This reviewer is not competent to judge the reliability and validity of the statistical methods and conclusions of the authors. Two fundamental issues are, however, of particular interest to the psychoanalyst: are the assumptions and hypotheses advanced about the nature and origins of anxiety and neurosis consistent with psychoanalytic theory? And, assuming that the claims for rating the factors that in the authors' views reflect neuroticism and anxiety are correct, can this exactness throw a new and more penetrating light on the therapeutic process and its outcome?
Part of the difficulty of evaluating this work is a semantic one. Terms and concepts which have a particular meaning in psychoanalytic theory, and have in fact been borrowed from psychoanalysis, are often given a mixed analytic and nonanalytic significance. For example, in discussing anxiety and drive we are told that 'evidence from clinical and everyday observation, from experiments on the higher mammals, and from comparative anthropology strongly suggests that the basic drives in man are several—hunger, sex, fear, self-assertion, gregariousness, curiosity, etc.—and that anxiety is probably only a secondary derivative in some way from experience of the action of these primary drives in certain punishing or depriving situati