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The first 30 pages of this comparatively large book are devoted to short sketches of the various “schools of abnormal psychology,” a feature which serves to orient the student in this tremendous field of endeavor. The subject matter is divided into thirty-four chapters, and an appendix, through which are presented sixty case notes illustrating points in the
discussion. The general attitude of the author toward such a volume is revealed in the preface as follows: “I am well aware that there is no finality about any of the views propounded in these pages. I regard this volume as an early, if not a first, attempt to bring into something like systematic order a very large and difficult province of science, hitherto cultivated in patches rather than as a whole.” And there are many pages of quotations from his previous books and papers: in fact one finds very little new material.
It is obvious that McDougall has accepted a great deal of the Freudian psychology, but he is frankly not able to subscribe to some of its fundamentals and to many of its details. Although the book contains such a mass of discussion which does not lend itself well to a comprehensive review concerning Freudian psychology, it may be well here to mention a few of the central points: The author holds that it is impossible to show that one dreams continually during sleep, and alleges that “this is merely one example of the tendency to gratuitous over-generalization which mars so much of the psychoanalytic literature.” He then proceeds to present and analyze some of his own dreams, qualifying this procedure in the following foot note: “There are, I think, good reasons for reciting and discussing my own dreams rather than a miscellaneous collection of dreams from many subjects. First, my own dreams are the only large collection of dreams of one subject available to me, and a group of dreams of one subject is more instructive than an assortment from the dreams of many subjects. Secondly one may interpret