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This book is an example of the tendencies towards occultism and mysticism seen nowadays. Because Freud has assumed-purely for clinical purposes-the existence of a psychological region which he has called the unconscious, and because he has investigated dreams-a subject hitherto associated with charlatanism and superstition and mysticism- and because he has been successful in founding a new school of psychology, it was perhaps inevitable that he should have drawn along in his
train a heterogeneous group of pseudo-thinkers who have rushed into print-and onto the lecture platform-with all sorts of wild psychology.
Some of these have followed Freud in so far as their intellectual limitations have permitted and have expounded a something which they called popular psychoanalysis. Others, comprehending vaguely that Freud has dealt with the race-preservative instinct and having their own share of repressions, have visioned a nice little psychology of their own wherein the motive force is a soul, a spirit, a “oneness with the infinite,” an Unseen Self or Higher Subject.
To this latter school belongs this book. The author starts out as follows: “The most unfortunate errors in psychology have proceeded from not understanding the nature of the difference between animals and man.” On page 2 she kindly calls attention to the error of Freud in overlooking the distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness. Animals, she says, are not self-conscious. I wonder if she ever saw a dog with a tin can tied to its tail?
On page 5 we find: “Insanity and criminality are high degrees of disturbance in the self-conscious sphere of our psychology.” Simple, isn't it?
Between the unconscious and the fore-conscious she inserts something which she calls pseudo-conscious, which she says is the “period of language insufficiency.”
The whole basis of her psychology seems to be a rather infantile optimism, a belief that the human race is striving towards altruism. The conflict, she represents, is