Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/86

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BOOK REVIEWS

is true in psycho-analysis is not new while what is new is not true. Those of us who appear to have forgotten what a prominent part the study of the unconscious played in the psychological lectures and text- books of our youth, for instance, need to be reminded that 'psychology has long taught that there are often influences at work on our minds which are not present in consciousness' (p. 21).

In his aim the author has found assistance in the works of Drs, Rivers, Myers, McDougall, Bernard Hart, Brown, Crichton Miller and Hadfield. It would be very difficult to find any element common to this hetero- geneous collection of writers beyond the scepticism they all evince about most of Freud's main conclusions, so that the reader will be surprised to find them christened here as 'neo-Freudians'. The prefix in this connection, as with the designations ' neo-Malthusian ', ' Neo-Darwinian ', and so on, should surely signify that the writers thus indicated have revived an older body of doctrine and have added to it while retaining its main principles. Psycho-analysis, never having lapsed, is in no need of being revived, and we cannot see how at any age a harsh opponent of the most distinctive Freudian principles could well be termed a ' neo-Freudian '.

Professor Valentine begins with a general account of conflict and repression and endeavours to approximate the latter conception to the accepted psychological ones of 'avoidance of pain' and the 'experience of trial and error', He admits three forms of repression: deliberate putting out of the mind, non-deliberate putting out of the mind, both of which are functions of consciousness, and the subsequent unconscious pressure against the return of the elements thus expelled; but not what is for Freud the most important form of repression — namely, the keeping of certain unconscious ideas out of consciousness (p. 38), That repression is ever the cause of neurotic trouble he doubts, for 'the forgetting (which is al! that repression seems to mean to the author) might have been an accompaniment of the development of tlie disease, the disease itself being caused by a more ultimate cause' {p. 37).

Freud's libido theory meets with no acceptance. 'He indulges in unnecessarily sweeping generalisations. He finds the influence oi sex in ahnost every abnormal mental process, though he covers this by a paradoxically wide interpretation of the term sex' (p. 18). What the words 'unnecessarily' and 'paradojdcal' mean in this context is not clear, nor how Freud could have avoided making these generalisations if they corresponded with his experience. Professor Valentine is especially concerned to defend the innocence of childhood against the imputation of sexuality, as indeed against other imputations. In quoting, for instance, from the present reviewer a list of anti-social impulses which have been modified in the child in the course of education, he makes the irrelevant complaint that.. 'it gives no hint of the many natural good impulses of