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Of outlines of the various phases of human enterprise there seem no end. This one is of “Psychology for Normal People.” At least today it is still that. Tomorrow it will be a statistical figure in the column of best sellers. The wide, popular appeal that psychology, or what goes under that name, enjoys assures it a far flung market among the educated parvenus to whom it is by implication addressed.
The book is divided into two parts. In the nine chapters comprising the first part, the writer discusses those types of psychological behavior which are characteristic of a development towards unreality—evasional conducts. In doing this he proposes to follow the example of Decroly and study the “abnormal” with a view to understanding the “normal.” Accordingly, we are treated to the spectacle of an Australian soldier playing with a doll while Zeppelins were bombing London. Though we are given few facts to make us comfortable in the assurance that this was an escape from reality by infantile regression, the burden of a whole chapter is built up on it to show that tantrums, whining, self-indulgence, boasting and bullying in the adult are the expression of similar mechanisms. Nor is it clear why a little further on in Chapter Five, many of the same symptoms characterizing the “microparanoiacs” are built up through the substitutive emotional achievement of “ego-inflation.”
In the other chapters of the first part, he discusses other forms of “unreal” psychologic activities: fixations on sexual, intellectual, religious, esthetic, vocational, etc., levels lower than it is possible to attain. Another form of psychologic phenomena treated is the pseudologic of “wish-thinking”