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In the past the author has published many books dealing with marriage and the family in which were presented with insight and usefulness many of the main psychological problems of growth and the dynamic responsiveness to emotional situations which mark the child's life. When the author has dealt with questions of marital adjustment he has always put particular stress on the possible increment of the results of the solutions made to the adaptations which must be made by the child. Whether such results add up for the child on the side of potential integration or maladaptation has seemed always to him a major consideration on the subject of marriage.
In the present book Dr. Groves has been concerned more with questions of mental hygiene as they relate to the adult. The tenor of the questions dealt with is indicated in the main chapter headings: The Framework of Personality; The Chemical Self; Body Management; Our Strategic Center; Our Cultural Watershed; The Scars of Childhood; The Fateful Passage; Our Psychic Power Plant; Uncovering the Hidden Self; The Mind Finds Wings; Sex, Friend or Enemy, etc. These titles show that the work is one of psychological popularization, and the fact that the present printing is a revised edition evidences that the author has found a response for the constructions set forth.
Better than most of the books designed on the same lines the one at hand conveys in concrete terms the dynamic meaning of behavior and the necessity for basing an understanding of it on conceptions of the organism as a whole rather than on some variety of facile “body-mind” principle. In this respect the conceptual groundwork basing this reading of the psychology of the adult follows the general pattern underlying that of Dr. Groves's treatment of childhood and adolescence. The sectors of all the major periods of individual growth are shown in terms of successive descriptions of behavioral integration in a whole plan of presentation which takes account of both the form