Cattell, Raymond B. crooked personalities in childhood and after. An introduction to psychotherapy. [New York and London:  D. Appleton-Century Company. $2.00.]

This is an entertainingly written primer of psychoanalysis with some amusing astigmatisms, i.e., as the reviewer views them. The normal-abnormal blab-blab words for instance, also the meaningless generalization ‘insane’—that should be used in its proper frame of reference which is ‘legal’ and something attempted to be defined by “courts of law”.

Quoting Dr. S. (p. 6), for instance, that “50% of physical illnesses have no true organic trouble underlying them” is nonsensical since every function, adapted or maladapted, must have an organ to function. The problem really consists in the “tower of Pisa” situation. Can the functioning reverse itself or not. Like those circus clowns on their rocking ladders, how far can they rock and come back again? If they fall should the situation be defined as “organic,” and if not as “functional”? Put in this way the blab-blab becomes evident even as the sentence that “physical change may result from psychological causes,” as if “psychological” was something different than physical. The “mind”—roughly speaking—is an organ function just as much as any other type of function. Accustomed as they are to their dualistic type of thinking, the phrasings of the academic psychologist suffer from the failure of thinking through the entire situation.

We disagree most strongly with the author's pronouncement that Shand and McDougall, for instance, provided “entirely sound accounts of the roots of human motivation”. These authors had very infantile notions of the ‘unconscious’ and their psychologies are definitely dated, useless and misleading, except for the mumbo-jumbo of the academic classroom.

The author makes a praiseworthy attempt to save the ‘academic’ baby. It were better thrown out with the bath.