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This book on the workings and vagaries of the mind has been written for popular consumption by the head of the Department of Psychology of Washington University, St. Louis. It includes descriptions of the psychology of conviction of the gullibility, of human minds, of mind reading ideas, of mental healing, including psychoanalysis, and of dream mechanisms, and mainly attempts to show how past and current superstitions tend to dominate and confuse the average mind, preventing it from functioning in a wholesome manner.
In a witty, entertaining style the author discusses, frequently in an anecdotal manner, the origins and pseudoscientific basis of various cults, such an astrology, mental telepathy, new thought, and numerology. In this list psychoanalysis is also included, particularly by the publishers in their descriptive paragraphs on the cover. These modern cults, which are really developments from the older superstitions, have been well “debunked,” a fact which should please one greatly were it not human nature to resent the “debunking” process when it is applied to the group in which one has made a few personal identifications.
It may make little difference to the psychoanalyst whether the professors of psychology and of physiology consider psychoanalysis in the light of a scientific procedure, but most analysts must long for the day when their would-be critics will emerge from their own “jungle,” acquaint themselves with the literature, and make impartial evaluations, or at least cease serving up unanalyzed dreams as contrary evidence on the basis of the perfectly obvious manifest content. Even the professors of psychology and anthropology must have dreams in which the manifest content is not the whole story! The same old oft encountered absurdity in criticism may be found in a part of the paragraph on page 298: “Judged by this view of Freud, all dreams are in vital but hidden relationship to our most intimate self. All of them are significant. They show our true s