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The author has previously published a short work entitled Life Without Fear, which essayed a general orientation to individual adaptational problems
along “spiritually” accented psychological lines. The present work would embrace a larger field, along the same lines. The two textual divisions are entitled Breaking Down, and Building Up. Some of the leading chapter headings include Liking Our Ailments, Adaptation to Environment, The Importance of Ideas, The Structure of Our Desires, Chance Associations, Mental Disguise, Direction Finding, The Discovery of People, Facing Life's Wholeness, etc. The limitations of the author's approach are made clear at the outset in that he would emphasize conscious states as the key to better adaptation rather than unconscious motivation. He adheres to the outmoded “functional-organic” categories as essential typical divisions in psychotic disorders, and stresses that the chapters deal with “disturbances of function due to errors in the realm of ideas. I desire to make it clear beyond any possibility of misunderstanding that I am concerned exclusively with the effects upon behavior of wrong thinking. No word I have said should be taken to have any application to nervous illnesses of physical origin, except to the extent that the patient's mental attitude towards himself in physical sickness may tend to promote or hinder his recovery.”
It is such underlying dualism which keeps this well presented work from coming to grips with the factors that underlie and shape the behavior deviations it would deal with—factors which in the main are unconscious, referring basically to the psychosomatic monism describing all inner and/or external organismic events. Emphasis on lines of conscious activity results in limiting the discussion chiefly to appraisals and valuations which, despite the constant use of “spiritual” constructions as a kneading medium relating them to subjective reactions, remain at base rather forced media away from the study of