Stagner, Ross. Psychology of Personality. New York and London:  McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc. $3.50.

In the present addition to the McGraw-Hill Publications in Psychology, under the consulting editorship of J. F. Dashiell, the author would provide an approach to the psychology of personality for advanced college students and laymen in which, according to the prefatory description, “average” take precedence over “abnormal” traits. It is noted that this stress has been decided upon because of students' protestations that most psychology texts deal more with “abnormalities” than with what they think constitutes the psychological configurations of daily life. Interpretative attitudes have been arranged accordingly.

There are four sections: the first, Introduction, dealing with methods under headings of “analytic approaches” and “study of the total personality.” By “analytic” is here meant the elaborations of measurements, tests, statistics, etc., making up the blunderbuss with which academic psychology would attack problems of deep human behavior; viewing the personality as the sum of so many separate parts rather than as an integrated whole. Section II is entitled Descriptive Psychology of Personality and Section III, Dynamics of Personality, consisting of three chapters: Appetites and Aversions; Theories of Dynamics, Freud, Adler, and Lewin; and A Cultural Interpretation of Motivation. The discussion of psychoanalysis is serviceable, deriving mainly from Hendricks, although the persistent use of the legalistic “normal-abnormal” viewpoint in appraising the utilization of concepts of dynamic processes limits the value of the exposition. A fully naturalistic approach to human behavior is not served by the textual incorporation of such purely imposed and moralistic adjudgment terms.

Section IV, dealing with biological and social factors acting as determinants of personality, includes chapters entitled Play and Reaction