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The message of this book is Freud's message: while “Unreason” is strong in us, stronger than anybody knew before Freud, “Reason” too has kathexis, is dynamic, as the author prefers to call it.
The book is divided into three parts. The second part (“Theory of Emotional Disturbances”) is squeezed in between two longer exposes on “History of Political Thought” and “Psychological Analysis of Social Systems and Events.” Parts one and three are influenced by the author's late father, Bernhardt Alexander, professor of philosophy in Budapest. In his second part, Alexander is given to a curious “re-interpretation of the factual substratum of psychoanalysis and differs somewhat from traditional representations.”
An unwritten law prohibits the practice of analyzing authors in book reviews. It is difficult not to break this law when the author dedicates his book to his “two great teachers Bernhardt Alexander and Sigmund Freud.” Alexander the Great also had two fathers, Philipp and Aristotle.
In his “Compendium of Psychopathology,” the author shows his often proved mastery of his subject. He defines all psychopathology as “characterized by irrationality and unintelligibility.” Borrowing from the physicist's terminology, maybe more pronely than is becoming a psychologist, he speaks of “inertia or the principle of economy” vs. “flexibility,” the principle of progress and creation. He attributes regression and fixation to the first principle, adaptive behavior, the constructive mind of the well adjusted individual to the latter. Thus are explained conflicts not only of individuals but also the ones between tradition and changing social structure. Wm. F. Ogburn's “Cultural Lag” is praised as “a discovery of the first magnitude disclosing a most significant disturbance in the rhythm of social evolution.” However, long before Ogburn and Alexander, even centuries ago, philosophers and sociologists have pointed at the same rather obvious discrepancy. Engels, e.g., called tradition the mill