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The author has made a study of the marriage situation involving intimate personal examinations of two hundred married men and women, the greater number of which were under forty years of age, and has here presented in considerable detail the “important things” happening during their childhood as well as their “present beliefs, attitudes, predicaments and characteristic modes of performance with reference to sex and marriage.”
The information gained of the sex life and attitudes of these subjects was obtained by the question method, arranged in a more elaborate way than has heretofore been done. To those women who had been pregnant, 372 questions were submitted; to those who had not been pregnant, 357 questions, and 334 to all the men. The questions covering a wide field of topics were presented on cards (for the sake of uniformity), to each subject in a private consulting room. This led to a vast accumulation of information such as is obtainable by the conscious verbal route, the classified results of which are presented in considerable detail.
A constant dependency upon “Freud's insights into the detailed working of human nature “is admitted freely by the author, who also expresses his admiration for Freud's genius, but he asserts that Freud in his dynamic attitude, falls into such serious errors as being overschematic, overspeculative and too metaphorical in the presentation of his concepts. He eulogistically gives credit to Dr. Adolf Meyer for influencing his present personal attitudes toward research in psychiatry and particularly in the interpretation thereof.
The research described in this book proceeded from this general problem, “Is marriage in itself a faulty institution in that it prescribes a mode of relationship between spouses which tends in the end, either seriously to impair or to destroy an originally established congeniality and an originally high sexual reactive value of spouse for spouse? Or does the fault lie essentially in the kinds of reactive equ