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This little volume by Berman explicitly deals with the above subject. The views of the author of “The Glands Regulating Personality” and “The Personal Equation” are worthy of consideration. He has acquired a national reputation by his works on the chemical roots of human behavior, character and personality, and his views on the present subject deserve attention. In his discussion of behaviorism the first chapters are devoted to a review of the doctrine and origin and of the concept and the way in which it has been received. In an interesting manner he presents his criticism of these current doctrines and sustains his thesis that behaviorism is really developing into a religion. He believes that the Gestalt movement is a more satisfactory explanation for those who have to deal with human beings in their everyday problems of personality disturbance and adjustment. To quote from his final chapter, “The Right to Feel Free”: “According to Gestalt-emergent principles we may look in the living for all sorts of new powers and capacities to occur. And we do find them to occur. Among them we observe conscious awareness, conscious thinking, conscious purposes, conscious ideals, conscious behavior, all of which we may summate under the name of mental properties. And among the most striking and the most cherishable is the feeling of freedom, and the ability to be free, conditionally.”
“We need therefore no longer fear that the future belongs to the Behaviorist. He may be founding a religion, but it will never be an intelligent religion. And no modern mind, sensitive to the prestige of the scientific method, need bow in acquiescence, feel compelled to accept its acrid canons.”
This little volume is written in the genial and entertaining style characteristic of the author, and his book shows that he is not a protagonist of behaviorism.