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Dr. Thorpe is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and offers this solid text of 602 pages as a Guide for Students and Teachers. He has felt that a large number of related efforts have been “as scattered and scrappy as leaves in the wind”, hence his desire to secure and present a thorough and systematic knowledge of the dynamic human personality picture.
The book would rest upon the facts and principles of genetic psychology. His statement that the psychoanalytic conceptions are mythical and animistic does not incline us to much sympathy with his more behavioristic attitude, since of all the contributions to the study of the personality the most thoroughly genetic are those derived from psychoanalytic research.
The author's use of such characterization as ‘lustful’, etc., show his bias immediately, and his setting over against the ‘libido’ conception, which he does not correctly state, the blab-blab term. “physiological needs” does not get one very far. If the perpetuation of the race is not a “physiological need” than we don't know our onions. The author certainly does not, since he speaks of the “unconscious mind”. No such conception is to be found in the freudian ideas. Nor does his wording the “evil Id” mean much. The Id is “beyond good and evil” if he but understood Freud. It is ambivalent, a concept apparently not comprehended by our author since he utilizes the superficial analogies of Morton Prince in his discussion. To state that “the whole (freudian) system is not based on verifiable objective techniques” is evidence that the author is supremely unaware of the psychoanalytic technique, in comparison with which, as to objectivity, all other techniques known to the reviewer are magnificently superficial.
Hence, for our psychoanalytic readers—we find another of those works so dear to the academic psychologist, unaware of the “unconscious”—not the “unconscious mind”—and all that it implies.
All the essentially sou