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If one hopes to find answers to the questions raised by the frightening events of the present in a book about aggression he will be disappointed. But
he will find here a very well-written work that combines psychoanalytical and ethological knowledge with one of the rarest qualities in the specialist—common sense. The book is dedicated to Konrad Lorenz, whose work has influenced the author's thinking. Dr. Storr, a London psychiatrist, writes with unusual clarity and is able to untangle complex problems with such ease that they look simple. If occasionally his presentation seems oversimplified, this does not detract from the value of the book, which is brief, easily readable, and has, despite its pessimistic content, a style of peculiar charm.
Although Storr is aware that the problem of war and destruction by nuclear weapons is complex and cannot be solved by psychology alone, he believes that the psychological point of view deserves equal consideration with political, economic, and other aspects. His aim is to demonstrate and explore in detail the necessity of the aggressive drive for healthy individual development and at the same time to show its involvement in neurosis and character distortion and how it might threaten the survival of the species, Homo sapiens.
The author avoids the use of psychoanalytic terminology, but his reasoning is based on analytic concepts. However, he thinks that psychoanalysts 'are apt to take too negative a view of aggression, and to neglect the more positive aspects'. He claims that there is a tendency among psychoanalysts to treat aggression as pathological. In following Freud's development of the concept of aggression, he concludes that there is 'nothing even in Freud's later work which would support the idea of a positive, primary aggressive drive'. Here Storr misses the mainstream of analytic thinking; his criticism could be directed toward some currents in sociological writings which are influnenced by the rampant popular