Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/65

 BOOK REVIEWS ' \ 57

nomic tonus. Through this principle, the constant tendency of the everchanging environment and metabolism to cause a state of autonomic tension and unrest is relieved, more or less, by a compensatory effort to reestablish a state of autonomic comfort' (p. 6g8). This mechanistic view is extended to man's activities as a whole : ' Man's civilization is simply the building of a more comfortable, controllable environment within the greater environment. . . Civilization is to be recognized as a protective compensation against the anxiety and autonomic unrest caused by the unfulfilled wish and uncontrollable environment' (p. 27). Further, 'the infant seems to be so constituted that no socialized interests exist in its personality until the compensations to prevent nn- pleasant social experiences begin to develop tkem ' (p. 77).

Dr. Kempf's criterion of mental normality is anything that serves to maintain the functional status of virility, goodness and happiness, and he devotes a special chapter to the biological definition of this standard and to its relations to current sociological ones. In his im- patience of irrational social conventions that ignore the facts of biology he fulminates against ascetic prudery with a vehemence and out- spokenness which, for obvious reasons, is commoner in America — one thinks of social writers like Mencken and Lippmann — than in Europe. 'Vulgarity is as intolerable to the prude as prudery is to the vulgar and both of these tendencies are to be avoided, because one is con- ducive to a biological degeneration of Man and the other, to his castra- tion. . . We must not accept from religious fanatics or purveyors of sex that the body is a filthy desecration of the soul ' (p. 3). ' The psychiatrists who avoid the sexual problems of their cases and the psychoanalytic method of studying them are to be classed with the medical cults that avoid the study of anatomy and physiology. Their resistance to the problems of sex is as rational as the medieval per- secution of dissection ' (p. 17).

The main content of the book is an attempt to express the data of psychopathology in terms of physiology and biology. In doing so the author evidently bases himself almost entirely on Sherrington's work on integration and PavlofTs on the conditioned reflex; he also takes the more questionable step of accepting the James-Lange hypo- thesis of the peripheral origin of emotion. He agrees that cortical localization and the study of the intra-cerebral neurones, important as such work may be in its own sphere, contribute little to the under- standing of the problems of personality as a whole. The key to these he finds in the functioning of the autonomic apparatus. He accepts the fundamental importance of Freud's conception of the Wish, but 'no one should be misled into assuming for its source a " psychic energy " ; it may be completely accounted for if it is recognized to be none other than a localized autonomic-affective craving and its compelling