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The chapters making up this book comprise three lectures delivered at the University of London in 1935, purporting to critically appraise the foundations and development of psychoanalysis especially in regard to its relations to social psychology. The titles are An Estimate of Progress and Prospects; Various Psychoanalytic Excursions into the Field of Social Psychology; Freud's Excursion into Social Psychology and the Consequent Progress of the Psychoanalytic Theory of Human Nature.
Workers in psychoanalytic psychiatry have long been acquainted with McDougall's negative and aprioristic approach to what have been, from the beginning, the foundations of psychoanalysis. The lack of actually working with the mentally ill, over long periods and in diverse circumstances, has essentially separated him from an understanding of those foundations; and the lack has apparently led him not to repair it by adding to his working experience but to devise from aristotelian postulates so-called logical answers to elements in psychoanalysis which run counter to the moralistic academic milieu he has come to represent.
Regarding the “survey” of psychoanalysis presented in this little book there is nothing new in substance added to what McDougall has written in this respect before. There is the same basic lack of comprehensive grasp of such factors as what is meant by the dynamic unconscious