Mental Adjustments. By Frederic Lyman Wells. Published by  D. Appleton and Company, New York. Price $2.50 net.

Wells has given us a book with respect to which it is quite difficult to form a single opinion. It covers a very large field, is filled with all sorts of information, has innumerable illustrations, and here and there sparkles with the brilliancy of the author in some specially apt phrase. From time to time as one is reading, however, one is apt to regret a little the rather frequent humorous situations which are utilized as examples, and to feel that an introduction of the telephone number of the Garden of Eden into a serious discussion is apt to detract from the real merit of the questions at issue.

With regard to the general treatment of dissociation the reviewer gets the impression that the author has not had very much first-hand experience with that theory in the days when it was more to the fore, and that he does not quite give it an adequate valuation. In the chapters on dissociation, too, the view that the unconscious is equivalent to that which is not in the field of awareness seems to be implied in the discussion. In fact throughout the book, with the exception of occasional sentences, this seems to be the implication, and yet, from the present psychoanalytic standpoint at least, such a use of the word unconscious seems hardly warranted, unless of course the author may so choose to use it and states his choice definitely. It is a way of using the word which might easily grow out of a study of the dissociation literature. Then, again, when he speaks of awareness as helping to make an adjustment it would seem that the author is committing the quite usual error in matters psychological of getting the cart before the horse, because after all awareness itself can only be a function of the individual-environment relation, and as such indicates something of the nature of that relation, and cannot properly be considered in any way primarily as a cause.

The author's treatment of various experimental studies and mental testings is especially satisfying as here he has l