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Professor Dunlap starts off his account of the development of social psychology by stating that the book is not intended to be comprehensive or absolutely systematic—facts which the reader would surmise while glancing over the second qualification which reads “the treatment is conservative in that it makes no use of ‘unconscious mental processes,’ the ‘unconscious mind’ or other popular substitutes for scientific principles. Psychology is fully competent to explain all mental processes, social as well as individual, without recourse to mysticism or pseudo-psychology.”This last phrase undoubtedly refers to analytic psychoogy in the Freudian sense toward which the author is antagonistic to the extent that he uses such terms as “non-conscious”instead of unconscious for identical mechanisms, has used the word “desire”eighteen times on one page in order to avoid the Freudian “wish,”and has stubbed his toe several times on his own bricks in attempting to avoid the concept of the unconscious in discussing the individual mind in the field of social psychology. Here unconscious reactions are both admitted and denied within rather narrow confines.
The chapters on sex differences, marriage and the family and on religious organization are very interestingly presented and contain a wealth of information on these and associated topics. The descriptive portions particularly contain much food for thought, but when ultimate causes come in for consideration, many still mooted questions are settled dogmatically after the fashion of the older orthodox psychology.
It seems to the reviewer that the most valuable portion of the book from the standpoint of stimulating constructive thought is the last half which deals with civic and marital organization, conditions of social progress including social inheritance, genetics, training, modification of germ cells and eugenics, and the general principles of social organization, and social control. Here the layman will find much of interest. The la