British Journal of Medical Psychology

Janet, P. L'Atonie et l'Asthenie Psychologiques.

and 3. Adler, A. Progress in Individual Psychology; and German Original.

Baynes, H. G. Primitive Mentality and the Unconscious.

Critical Notice. Book Reviews. Abstracts.

Janet, P. L'Atonie et l'Asthenie Psychologiques. This paper, of little interest psychoanalytically, deals with the conception of doubtful value, i. e., psychical energy which he says may some day be expressed in mathematical terms.

Thus Janet would think that a maniacal individual is using more psychical energy than a quiet one—as if—in an analogous sense a motor car which runs into a post and is smashed is using more energy than when it is going smoothly where it ought to go, or that an engine that strips its gears is using more energy than one that runs in its proper gear. It is this kind of faulty thinking about the whole energy problem that convinces the reader of the uselessness of Janet's conceptions of psychical energy in psychopathology.

and 3. Adler, A. Individual Psychology. This is Adler's address before the Oxford Psychological Congress. It also appears as a chapter in his book on Individual Psychology (Harcourt, Brace and Co.). That all mankind have instinctive hereditary patterns that push them towards certain goals. This teleological goal for Adler is the “will to power”—and if phenomena can be stripped of all other wrappings this fundamental aim will emerge. For Adler “power” really means “ego power”—i. e., what in the Freudian psychology is a direct development out of anal eroticism. Thus Adler stays at the paranoid, narcissistic level of anal-eroticism as his key to all of the phenomena of human behavior. For him truly self-preservation is the first law of nature.

Baynes, H. G. Primitive Mentality and the Unconscious. An interesting paper on the general subject of recapitulation. The general principle is no longer in need of elucidation but the illustrative material is always of interest. Human beings undoubtedly need al