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This book is apparently the result of the experience of the author with the affective group of mental disorders plus contact with the case records and stimulating personalities and ideas of Dr. August Hoch, Dr. George Kirby and some of their assistants during a period in the history of the Psychiatric Institute at Wards Island, New York. The text is a combination of academic discussion, descriptive psychiatry and psychoanalytic attitudes presented in a manner that does not lend itself easily to a comprehensive review; particularly is this true of the portions dealing with the construction of the author's tentative theory of emotions which involves many still actively mooted questions.
In preparing this study of the emotions the author in precisely defining his terms, not only in a comprehensive glossary but early in the text, in the sense of their use from his point of view, avoids many misunderstandings on the part of the reader, a feature many writers on psycho-biological topics might observe with profit and economy. For example: “Affect is any subjective experience that when examined introspectively is considered to originate in or belong to the subject's individual organism. It may be felt to be either mental or physical, to be stimulated by a sense perception, by a thought, or to be causeless. But in no case is it thought to be a quality of the stimulus, except in relation to the subject,” and again “Emotional expressions are objective phenomena which may qualify instinctive behavior or betray an attitude. They consist of gestures, postures, movements of parts of the face, vocal expressions, modulations of the voice and many visceral changes,” also “Personality may be defined as an integration of the sum total of the reactions of an individual that are peculiar to that individual.”
To MacCurdy as well as to some others instinct is not a type of behavior, but as an entity is only a hypothetical factor, and in his lengthy discussions of theories of the emotions see