Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/64

 56 BOOK REVIEWS

■ an idea, which requires as constant innervation and affective reenforce-

meot as the performance of countless movements to attain an end. ' '

The extent to which a writer acknowledges his obligation to prev- ious workers cannot always be strictly correlated, however, with the amount he has actually learned from them, so we next made a. careful study of the book with a view to determining this point on the one hand, and on the other ascertaining the nature of Dr. Kempf's own contributions to the science of psychopathology. It may be said at once that, although our original expectations were not fulfilled, we were by ^ no means disappointed. Dr. Kempf has evidently learned a good deal

t from psycho-analytical writings and he has also done a great deal of


 * independent work. Of his powers of thought we formed a less favour-


 * able impression: what might pass with some as original ideas more

often seemed to us to be merely novel modes oi formulation, the util- ty of which was not always obvious. The tendency to isolate himself from other workers, hinted at above and shewn in many ways throughout the book, is perhaps the author's chief weakness. Not only is there not (. the slightest attempt to correlate his experience and points of view

\ with those of other workers, but there seems to be a positive distaste

against such a procedure ; the task of following the author is made f extremely difficult not merely by the way in which he adheres through-

i out to his own language and terminology, which he has of course

f every right to do if he finds it more helpful, but by his failure to


 * ■ indicate the relation of this terminology to that otherwise employed.


 * A prominent merit of the book which wins our sympathetic interest

I from the outset is the author's essentially biological outlook. No attempt

is made to describe the findings of psychopathology in terms of some ethical system, and there is no trace of any of the anagogic or mystical interpretation of data that has so hampered the scientific work of other i writers. For Dr. Kempf Man is primarily an imperfect animal who has

L become trained to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli. The

I meaning of man's behaviour he sees in the need to regain a state of

rest and comfort by neutralising, in more or less suitable ways, these disturbing stimuli. Nothing could be in better accord with this funda- mental principle of modern clinical psychology than the following statement. 'These affective-autonomic tensions or cravings, constituting the zftsk to do, to be, to have, etc., compel the organism to expose the favorite receptors of the craving so that they may receive from the environment those stimuli which have the quality, through counter stim- ulation, of arousing autonomic reactions, which, in turn, neutralize the undue autonomic tensions and restore a state of comfortable auto-

• It is only fair to say that there are a few other and more compliment- ary references to Freud in the text which are not entered in the index.