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The beginner in psychology nowadays may take his choice among a number of fascinating schools. He may embrace the orthodox school and renounce Freud and all his works, or he may follow after Thorndike and Watson. The more experienced educators and psychiatrists, and all others who have seen methods come and go, will finally settle upon that school which satisfies most nearly their personal needs, and live happily ever afterwards. But the nonprofessional students, the employer, the educated layman, and others, are not fortified by any particular store of psychological knowledge and are likely to be somewhat bewildered by the profusion of wares exhibited.
To these beginners comes Miss Brierly with her little book. She has done an excellent service. We would advise students of psychology, and especially those starting out de novo, to read this book first of all.
A survey of what she has accomplished in her comparatively narrow limits will give some idea of this service.
First, she has outlined the scope and methods of psychology, giving a satisfactory, in brief, résumé of the methods of the experimentalists, the introspectionists, behaviorists, and so on. She has indicated how, from different ways of looking at biological phenomena, different schools have come into existence. Of psychoanalysis she says in one place, “The main contentions of this school have been amply substantiated by the evidence”; and in another, “Considered as research, psychoanalysis is seen to employ all these types of psychological method, and to employ them in such a way that each shall assist the other.”
She goes on to discuss the various instincts and their part in character formation. In her remarks on organism and environment, on the significance for the mental life of the wish, and on the problem of the unconscious,