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This is a study of certain phases of the marriage of two hundred people by analysis of their answers to a great number of questions asked by a psychiatrist.
It is a dull, valuable, powerful and disappointing book. It is dull because it is a broken mosaic, covering too large an area for the eye to see. It is valuable because all authentic material of this kind has pioneering importance. It is powerful, because the life strained into the terminology of this new science shows itself at times creative and genuine. It is disappointing because after two hundred people had answered nearly tour hundred questions apiece we know hardly any more about the problem of marriage than we knew at the beginning.
Opening with precise statements of the method and the generalizations in use, the text goes on to simple objective data about money, relatives—in—law, fertility, personality, menstruation and pelvic operations which give the setting and occupy about a third of the volume. The second phase is of subjective data, very difficult to handle. It involves recollections, judgments and present evaluations of the family, the love affairs, dreams, sex curiosity, sex experience, reactions to coitus and many factors in the emotional life. It occupies more than a second third of the whole and at its close, the manuscript really ends. The active and vigorous contribution drawn from the patients‘experience, thins to the cross—checking and correlation of that experience with certain theories, and the last third flattens, though strengthened by a summary, to a diminishing close.
The material has been made thoroughly anonymous. Important data are buried for the time being since the author felt obliged to withhold from publication much of the evidence which went to make up his own mind. The book conforms to scientific method in that the basic questionnaire was administered under strictly comparable conditions, in that it gives great quantities of verbatim data which permit the student to arrive at