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This timely volume is an expansion of a chapter on the neuroses appearing in the author's “Text-book of Clinical Neurology.” Dr. Wechsler has here condensed the views of the several “schools” of abnormal psychology and has also expressed his personal adaptation of these doctrines. The subject has been introduced with a brief history of psychiatry, beginning at the dawn of scientific thought and ending with the latest developments of psychopathology. He emphasizes that the knowledge of human behavior has slowly accumulated from all sorts of sources, including the study of children of primitive peoples, of mental defectives, and investigation into animal behavior, myths and folklore. The study of the “neuroses” has contributed the most illuminating information of importance in recent years, since it has made possible the conclusion that “abnormal” mental mechanisms are not different in kind from the “normal” ones and that “what is regarded as intellectual not only springs from the instinctive or emotional side of life, but cannot be easily dissociated one from the other”—“a dynamic psychology came to replace the descriptive one.”
The author makes a clear and concise discussion of the Freudian principles of abnormal psychology including the terminology and compares them with the modifications of Jung, Adler and others. In the