Such faults in a book of this sort are serious but only in so far as the work is theoretical. The main object of the book is to present facts in an unbiased way and for the first time we have them in anything like completeness. The importance of Dr. Healy's labors cannot, then, be overestimated. His publication will be eagerly welcomed by the army of workers who see a few cases at various stages of delinquency and who long to know authoritatively what the types are, how they develop, what the outlook is, and how that may be modified by appropriate treatment. We owe him much. JOHN T. MACCURDY.
HUMAN MOTIVES. By James Jackson Putnam, M. D. Professor Emeritus, Diseases of the Nervous System, Harvard University. Boston. Little, Brown & Co., 1915; 12mo. Price $1.
According to the publishers' announcement this is a study in the psychology and philosophy of human conduct, based largely on the author's use of the Freudian psychoanalytic method of mental diagnosis. The editorial introduction by Dr. Bruce consists in a brief outline of the subconscious mind. The author's preface, aside from anticipating the main features of the book, makes the announcement that the latter is based very largely on the personal experience of the last two years. The author gives one the impression that this period represents to him one in which he has to his own satisfaction mastered the relationship between psychoanalysis on the one hand and our current conception of moral philosophy, ethics and religion on the other. During this period he has "studied motives at close range."
The work consists of six chapters and of these the first two deal with the philosophic method of viewing man, while the others are devoted to psychoanalysis. In the last chapter the author makes suggestions as to the possibility of synthesizing the two methods.
Human motives are either constructive or adaptive. The former are associated with conscious reasoning and will, the latter with emotional repressions. The former represent aspirations and are much higher than they seem, since every man has an ideal-"getting out the best that is in himself." He is a "lover of the best" and will die for and live for mere ideas and abstractions like patriotism. He is assumed to be free because he voluntarily creates, and is as free as anything in the Universe; and he is free because he can choose. But where there is freedom there must be clashing and compromise and repression. Among repressed subjects are prejudices and superstitions, which, while irrational, unconsciously affect our conscious motives.
Man has feelings of humanity and brotherhood but has also the feeling of separate individuality which comes from the egoism of the young child. The instincts also come into play in the conflict between duty to others and love of self. No one, however good, can escape this conflict.
The old teaching as exemplified in philosophy and religion is based on a study of man at his best, man in the abstract. This is incomplete because it cannot promote such feelings as sympathy and understanding among men. Something has always been needed to supplement it and this is found in psychoanalysis in which conditions are reversed.
Religion the author regards as an existence which is in harmony with that of the "universe-personality." If we have the attributes we give to the Deity as reason, love (disinterested) and will, we should seek this harmony. The "world of sense" is antagonistic to this conception, in that it leads us to reject all other than sense knowledge. Our notions of love, honor, power, justice cannot spring from the sense-world. We must look beyond the latter-a mere illusion-to find the true, immutable. Mind cannot be evolved from life but must pre-exist. God and man must be conceived in the same way-both represent a totality of expressions of world will, both create and persist in their creations. Man must be regarded as creating his thoughts and acts, even his own body. Every portion of the universe is responsible for every other portion. Man, though ever changing, represents a "self consciously unified person" and therefore feels responsible for all he has ever done or ever will do. Freud himself, as the author states, never cared to generalize on the subject of psychoanalysis.
The book proceeds with a general outline of psychoanalysis which need not be reproduced here. The subject of sexual repression, so far from being exaggerated by Freud, is completely borne out by centuries of teaching by the Church that all sexual matters must be repressed, because they proceed solely from the flesh, the material world. As we have seen, however, the author with others-both Freudians and non-Freudians-makes the libido a form of creative energy, which attitude lifts it above the purely material plane. Complete suppression of anything which will not down is regarded as unwise hygiene of the soul, and the results of psychoanalysis, both as to cause and cure of neurotic disturbances, amply sustain this view. A man's unbidden thoughts are part of him and must be acknowledged.
Psychoanalysis cannot be employed upon a number of subjects at once. It lies between physician and patient, teacher and pupil. The unconscious but active motive must be brought under the conscious will. The fantastic world of childhood must be re-created. The teacher, dealing with childhood has an advantage over the physician who applies his analysis to adults.
The child should be encouraged to show all that is in him, and at the same time must learn to regard himself less as an individual and more as a social unit. He should do things which divert him from himself.
In psychoanalysis an act is nothing, a tendency everything. The latter must be changed. In analysis of one's self one must avoid all tendency to self depreciation, since all must make mistakes. One should also distrust in himself whatever savors of emotional excess.
There is no radical difference between the neurotic and sound subject in respect to the presence of unreasonable fears, compulsions and obsessions. Stress of circumstances causes even the normal man to show objectionable traits. Mental disease-phenomena, like physical, indicate natural reactions, or "attempts at repair" such as are found in the organic and even inorganic worlds.
Treatment by psychoanalysis represents an education-the removal of inhibitions which are fixations or arrests.
The fifth chapter is in a way a resume of what the author had previously said. He also seeks to reduce his teachings to a tabulation. The rationalisation or adaptation of life progresses in proportion as the individual is mature, but here maturity is by no means equivalent to age. The process also is active in the immature child.
A subject is usually quite unaware of his fixations and explains the results of his internal conflicts by false reasoning. Rationalisation in this connection becomes a bad habit.
All motives are creative. The act is not the result of the immediate motive but of all those which preceded it. The final act throws no light on the original motives.
In speaking of certain adults as children who never grew up, we are referring to a much larger class than is commonly understood. All who attain mature years with fixations are to be regarded as children. All individualists belong here unless their individualism is merely a stepping stone to altruism. Indeed, we see in all men a desire to place themselves on a pinnacle. This craving seeks expression in a thousand acts. Even if outgrown it may assert itself in times of stress. It is of benefit at times when individuals espouse just but unpopular causes. What we ordinarily call courage involves self assertion but a higher courage is involved in refraining from certain things.
All individuals also have occasional cravings to get away from responsibility and back to rest and pleasure. We long to get back to a theoretical state of childhood, as the infant longs to return to his mother's body.
For a number of reasons this not a work to be criticized. The author does not mean to be dogmatic. His dicta, while they may have the ipse dixit flavor, are not meant to be axioms. The creative energy of the mind can formulate these dicta and they must clash with the convictions of others. It is easy to deride the method as a method, but we must judge it by its results. In Emerson's hands it became a profound stimulus to thought to people of quite dissimilar mental makeup. In like manner the author's work will prove of the highest suggestive value to the reader, and especially the materialistic reader. But aside from the general character of the book we must not forget that it has a very definite object, to wit, to elevate psychoanalysis to the highest planes of philosophical speculation and to remove the prejudices of those who profess to go to the other extreme and see in it only the slime of the pit. The author's attempt to bring it in unison with the eternal verities is deserving of the highest commendation and illustrates his deep faith in the nobility of this new resource for understanding the spiritual side of man. L. PIERCE CLARK, M. D.
EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY: VOL. I, THE ORIGINAL NATURE OF MAN VOL. II, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING. By Edward L. Thorndike. Published by Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, 1913.
In the first three chapters of Vol. I Professor Thorndike introduces what he calls the 'original tendencies' of man. These are the simpler and what have often been called the 'instinctive', or 'innate' forms of behaviour. And they are here taken as innate, in contradistinction to learned; as the inherited dispositions on which the character of the adult is built. In Chapters IV to X, inclusive, these original tendencies are enumerated and described. This is a valuable, although somewhat unordered, inventory of the more elementary human activities. A wholesome step is taken in replacing the terms 'pleasure' and 'pain' (subjective categories supposed from time immemorial to account for many sorts of reaction and to be the basis of the learning process) by the more objective terms 'satisfiers' and 'annoyers'. The author inclines away from the common idea that very young individuals exhibit random or diffuse activities
A curiously baffling and admirably sceptical chapter on the Emotions (XI) is followed by a largely destructive chapter on Consciousness, Learning, and Remembering, in which Prof. Thorndike is in point of literary style almost at his worst; and in some cases incoherent (e.g. p. 185, middle). The chapters on the Anatomy and Physiology, on the Source, on the Order and Dates of Appearance and Disappearance, and on the Value and Use of Original Tendencies seem to the reviewer inconclusive and uninspired. There are shrewd and interesting remarks here and there, particularly those of a destructive intent, which the older reader will appreciate; while on the whole he will wonder whether the author has, in these last four chapters, any other than the whimsical aim of producing bedlam in the minds of his younger readers.
Vol. II is a long treatise of 452 pages on the faculty of Learning. The author would probably reject the suggestion that he is dealing with his subject in the spirit of the faculty psychology. Learning, he would say, is an empirical fact, which he is simply describing. So also, however, the 'faculties' are empirical phenomena-attention, memory, and all the rest. The question is, do Prof. Thorndike and others like minded analyze the phenomena in a way that reveals their mechanism, or in the unfruitful manner of the faculty psychology? Is, for instance, the mind an aggregate of the following "functions that have been, or might be, studied:-Ability to spell cat, ability to spell, knowledge that Rt 289 equals 17, ability to read English, knowledge of telegraphy,... . ability to give the opposites of good, up, day, and night, ... . fear and avoidance of snakes, misery at being scorned," etc., etc. (p. 59)? To the reviewer it appears that these 'functions' are cross-sections of the mental life which reveal NOTHING of the mind's real mechanism. This way, surely, lie the maximum of pedantry and the minimum of scientific insight. The volume as a whole may be recommended to those who wish to ascertain to what extent academic psychology of to-day is still dominated by the spirit of faculty psychology. E. B. HOLT.
SLEEP AND SLEEPLESSNESS. By H. Addington Bruce. Little, Brown & Co.
Boston, 1915. Pp. vii, 219.
This book constitutes the third volume of the "Mind and Health" Series. In it the author has given an admirable and clear summary of the recent psycho-pathological work on sleep and sleeplessness. He begins by a discussion of the nature of sleep and considering the difficulties involved in making such a discussion clear to the average reader, the author has done remarkably well in summarizing the technical work along this line. He then passes to the problem of dreams and the part played by the unconscious mechanism involved in dreaming, laying particular and justifiable stress upon the point, that when problems are solved or adjusted in dreams, they have always been previously solved by a kind of unconscious incubation during the waking moments. The chapters on the disorders of sleep and the causes of sleeplessness are brief but comprehensive, while in the discussion of sleeplessness important stress is laid on the mental elements involved in every case of insomnia. A strong plea is made for the psycho-therapeutic rather than the pharmacologica, treatment of the disorders of sleep. On the whole the book is clearly written and can be recommended to those who wish a brief and at the same time comprehensive account of the modern theories of sleep and its disorders. ISADOR H. CORIAT.
A CORRECTION.
To the Editor of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
I wish to call your attention to the fact that the quotation attributed to me on p. 135 in the June-July issue of your Journal is a misrepresentation of what I actually said. Due to an oversight on the part of the publishers of the A. M. A. Journal, the stenographer's notes of the A. M. A. meeting were not submitted to the members of the Section for examination and correction. The Editor of the A. M. A Journal regretted this fact and the discussion of my paper "The Conception of Homosexuality," from which this quotation was taken, was published in corrected form in the Transactions of the Section of Nervous and Mental Diseases (1913) of the A. M. A. A. A. BRILL
BOOKS RECEIVED
PATHOLOGICAL LYING, ACCUSATION AND SWINDLING. By William Healy and Mary Tenney Healy. Pp. 278 Plus x and Indexes. Little, Brown & Co., 1915.
THE CRIMINAL IMBECILE. By Henry Herbert Goddard. Pp. 154 Plus vii & Index.
The MacMillan Co., 1915. $1.50.
CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT. By Joseph Jastrow. Pp. 596 Plus xviii. D.
Appleton & Co., 1915. $2.50 net.
A SURGEON'S PHILOSOPHY. By Robert T. Morris, M. D. Pp. 575 Doubleday, Page & Co. $2.00 net.
BACKWARD CHILDREN. By Arthur Holmes. Pp. 247. Bobbs, Merrill. $1.00 net.
A MECHANISTIC VIEW OF WAR AND PEACE. By George W. Crile. Pp. 105 Plus xii.
The MacMillan Co. $1.25.
THE JOURNAL OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY
SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS[*]
WITH A THEORY TO EXPLAIN THE DREAM-PROCESS AS APPERCEPTIVE TRIAL-AND-ERROR.
[*] A paper read at Columbia University, April 19, 1915, at a Joint Meeting of the New York Branch of the American Psychological Association and the New York Academy of Sciences, Section of Anthropology and Psychology.
Copyright 1916, by Richard G. Badger. All Rights Reserved.
LYDIARD H. HORTON
HISTORICALLY speaking, dreams have always been credited with meanings; but, in a given case, the psychologist must ask, how far does the accredited meaning represent the mere fancy of the interpreted and how far does it mirror actual conditions in the dreamer's mind. To seek aught beyond these is but idle divination. For of all dreams it is true, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "that the reason for them is always latent in the individual." "Things are significant enough, Heaven knows;" he exclaims, "but the seer of the sign,-where is he?"[1]
Not till the last year of the nineteenth century, did an answer come; it was Sigmund Freud's work, "The Interpretation of Dreams," which said, in effect, "Here am I, in Vienna."[2]
THE FREUDIAN PRETENSIONS
"In the following pages," he begins, "I shall prove that there exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activities of the waking state."
The sweeping character of this pretension has not been justified. The demonstration has succeeded only with that large class of dreams in which there happens to be a trend of infantile reminiscence and of disguised sexual phantasy. It fails to reveal the inner nature of other kinds of dreams or the modus operandi of dreaming as a process of thinking. And while it is asserted by the publishers of the English[3] edition that the main contentions of his book have never been refuted, the fact is that his thesis has not been accepted by the representatives of scientific psychology, as a solution of the problem.
The exponents of Freudian interpretations today are medical men associated with the practice of so-called "Psychoanalysis;" which means that they are more concerned to apply Freud's ideas for the treatment of nervous ailments than to cultivate pure psychology. An examination of the methods they exemplify in individual practice and in the large literature of the psycho-analytic movement shows sufficient reason, in my view, why the psycho-analytic theory of dreams should still be greeted with skepticism. Psycho-analysts tell us that repugnance for the subject-matter has delayed acceptance of their essentially sexual interpretations. But there is also a resistance based on sound logical criticism. Judged by this standard, Freud's theory appears dangerously inaccurate and needs revision.
THE TWO SCHOOLS OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
Dr. C. G. Jung, formerly a pupil and literal follower of Freud, is attempting to reform psycho-analytic doctrine from within the fold.[4] Incidentally, he tells us that there is nothing essentially novel about the technique of investigating the dream in Psycho-analysis. It copies the methods of historical and literary criticism and consists in collecting all the data possible about each item of the dream. These are then called the dream material. What seems to me novel and characteristic is the psycho-analytic method of working up this material into an interpretation by a process of inference. Freud and Jung are today no longer in agreement as to the details of this process.[6] Speaking of the interpretations of these authorities, on the basis of extended investigations of dreams on my own part, I must say that their methods do not seem to be as rigorous, as is required today in the investigation of literary and historical problems, nor capable of bearing comparison with experimental psychology.
It must be acknowledged, however, that Freud has infinitely refined the guesses of earlier generations of thinkers as to the relationship of sleep-fancies to the waking life. He has conferred startling precision upon the general proposition of Goethe "that these whimsical pictures, inasmuch as they originate from us, may well have an analogy with our whole life and fate." And he has certainly vindicated in practice that dictum of Emerson: "A skilful man reads dreams for his self-knowledge."[1] But he has formulated no open-sesame, as psycho-analysts proclaim.
When it comes to the use of symbols, the Viennese professor parts company with the Concord philosopher. The latter, as we know, decried the mystical conception of fixed symbolism in any domain. But Freud, although theoretically agreed, falls victim in practice to the fascinations of the dream-book cipher method which he has condemned. The adjective Freudian is now justly a by-word, among psychopathologists, for a stereotyped habit of reducing each item of a dream to some cryptic allusion or roundabout reference to the primitive demands of the infantile and sexual life. Freud's fertility in such interpretations has led one of our best-known experimental psychologists to say, in mingled admiration and impatience: "His utterances are those of a poet, not of a scientist."