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Of the making of books there is no end, and those who are interested in the spread of the psychoanalytic movement should welcome all of the various works that are now coming out and dealing with this new psychology from one or the other angle. Many, if not most, of these books, of which the two named above are examples, are obviously intended for popular consumption and are more or less expository in
form. Aside from these characteristics it is frequently rather difficult to discover why many of them have been written other than as they testify to the interest of the authors. They usually contain very little, if anything, that is new, and not infrequently misstate fundamentals.
Professor Valentine's book, “Dreams and the Unconscious,” is evidently written from the standpoint of the teacher who is interested in analysis, although the audience to which he is addressing himself is rather difficult to define. While the book undertakes to set forth merely the principles of psychoanalysis, it is rather sketchily done and in parts at least it is strongly suggestive of a lack of profound appreciation of those principles by the author. This is particularly true of his discussion of repression (115ff). He seems to have a great deal of difficulty with the. understanding of “normal” and comes to the rather astounding conclusion (87) that normal persons are in the minority.
For a kindergarten presentation of psychoanalysis it is rather difficult to understand why the author should engage in controversial topics. He seems possessed of the idea that psychoanalysis is not such a new thing as its proponents would have us believe, but that many of its tenets already resided, at least by implication, in the psychology of pre-analytic days, more specifically in the association psychology of that time. The reviewer is perfectly willing to agree that all of the implications and utilities that Jung has wrung out of the association method were there before he touched it, quite in the same