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To the first edition of this work have been added Lecture XVII (The Structure and Dynamic Elements of Human Personality), and Lectures XVIII-XX (The Psychogenesis of Multiple Personality— The Case of B. C. A.).
This work of Dr. Prince comprises a series of lectures designed as a course in psychology for medical students to precede the courses in psychiatry and neurology. Such a course is highly desirable and it is about time that the medical schools should appreciate its necessity based upon the fact that there can be no adequate dealing with the sick individual as patient that does not take into consideration the personality make-up and arrange therapeutic devices accordingly.
As to the matter of the lectures. In the first place the term Unconscious seems to the reviewer to be used in a rather confusing, not to say unfortunate sense, despite the author's efforts to define it clearly. He uses the term subconscious generally to include what he terms the co-conscious, or “actual subconscious ideas which do not enter the content of the conscious awareness “and the unconscious, or “neural dispositions and processes” (p. x). Co-conscious phenomena are those long ago made familiar by the work of Janet and by the author in his excellent case reports, and by many others, and include the familiar phenomena of dissociated mental states, multiple personality, etc.
What is included in his concept of the unconscious, however, is somewhat more difficult to understand. He uses the term “to characterize that which is devoid of the attributes of consciousness” (p. 249). While the reviewer agrees with the author that it smacks of quibbling to object to the term “unconscious ideas” as involving a contradiction in terms “as we know well enough that the adjective is used in the sense of unawareness” (p. 250, footnote), still to speak of the unconscious in one place as “that which is devoid of the attributes of consciousness “(p. 249) and in another as “neutral dispositions and processes