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Charlotte Buhler is a clinician, teacher, and writer whose professional career extends in time to the 1920's, and in distance, from Vienna to Los Angeles. From such an experienced and prominent person, it is a surprise and a disappointment to receive a thoroughly weak, slipshod book.
This work is structurally inept; it attempts to cover too many topics and succeeds in doing little more than introducing them. A list of a few of the seven chapter titles: Theoretical Concept of Values; Values, The Self, and Personality Theory; The Self and Values in Human Development; Values in Healthy and Neurotic Development—gives some feeling for the breadth of coverage attempted. Each of these, if dealt with comprehensively, could comprise a very large book, but Dr. Buhler by loosely surveying the areas, and selectively using material, manages to put them all into one short book. The work is badly edited as well as badly conceived: some text references do not correspond to those in the list of references, and H. S. Sullivan is credited with Conceptions of Modern Psychotherapy (reviewers's italics). Competent editing—and here one must certainly reprimand The Free Press—should have eliminated such defects, and might have made a coherent book from this collection of occasionally provocative thoughts, speculations, survey of literature, clinical material and attempts at theorizing.
Two general themes mutually entangle themselves through the text. One is an attempt to delineate some of the value issues that need to be considered by psychotherapists; the other is a presentation of the author's personal views on developmental theory, handling of value issues in therapy, and on other theorists. Most of the good that could have come from either theme is lost by the author's failure to distinguish clearly between them.
Beyond weaknesses of structure, this book has several quintessential flaws. In its scholarship and in its conception of scientific thinking, the uses of evidence, and the relatio