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This book would provide a casebook for students, comprised of original autobiographies dealing with personality adjustment. The author is visiting professor of Educational Psychology in the Duke University Summer School, and in charge of the Division of Special Education and Mental Hygiene of the Delaware State Department of Public Instruction and the Wilmington Public Schools. The text shows a cross-section view of individual conflicts and maladjustments, described as reported by “intellectually normal and superior individuals.” The analytic level presented is not deep. There is much in the accounts themselves to be of value to the student of psychoanalysis, though this is despite rather than due to the editorial approach. This approach is made clear in the introduction, which states in part: “Upon consultation it has been deemed advisable not to include in this volume a section on sex practices, problems, and maladjustments. A few of these cases appear in the companion text on Personality Maladjustments and Mental Hygiene.”
What is given mainly relates to processes of early conditioning; the rise in a variety of guises of different degrees of personal maladjustment; the bearing of social and external factors in the genesis of the individual conflict; and the methods towards adjustment devised subjectively and objectively by different individuals. There are twenty-nine sections, each drawn according to the type of reaction chiefly concerned. Thus there is specific material relating to fears and phobias, anxiety, inferiority feelings, obsessions, compulsions, dreams, etc.
It is regrettable that so much useful material could not have had a textual setting aware of the dynamic psychoanalytic values to be derived from the personal records dealt with. Had this been so the original material would have been enhanced in value, and the whole placed above the clinically useless level of abstract “normal”—”abnormal” equivocations set for it by the psychological orientation main