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This book represents another attempt to perform a service which is nowadays felt to be an urgent one, that is, to portray and explain some of the forces which make for social maladjustment. The same attempt, in a somewhat different manner, was made recently by Dr. Southard in his posthumous work, “The Kingdom of Evil.” It seems to be felt instinctively by workers in the field of social psychiatry that the case-history method of presentation is the most valuable, and this is the one followed in this book.
The chapter titles are attractive: “The Instinctive and Emotional Bases of Behavior,” “Emotional Conflicts in the Causation of Conduct Disorders,” “The Relation of Personality Types to Behavior,” “The Unbiological Behavior of the Suicide,” all these, and others, state subjects well worthy of being thoroughly treated. Unfortunately, the writers do not deal with them adequately, as a rule.
Chapter I is a résumé of the psychological explanation of behavior, which is very good, in brief, giving space to the orthodox viewpoint and due credit to the work of Watson, Freud, and Adler. The chapters immediately succeeding are not so satisfactory. In Chapter VI an effort is made to cover the whole subject of mental disease; the result is a compendium of 62 pages, dealing with dementia precox, the manic-depressive psychoses, involutional melancholia, paranoia, arteriosclerotic and senile psychoses, general paresis and cerebrospinal syphilis, various toxic psychoses, epilepsy and feeblemindedness. Twenty-six cases are reported in some detail to illustrate these psychoses. Naturally the result is unsatisfactory. It simply cannot be done.
The chapter on drug addiction leaves much to be desired. This subject looms large before the public eye just at present, and there is a great field for perspicacious literature on the subject. Much that has been