Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/78

 234 BOOK REVIEWS

understanding of human conduct". The very clear account of Freud's theory of dreams is prefaced as follows (p. 139) : "The analysis and interpretation of dreams has become an exceedingly important part of modern psychology. Surely no more interesting example can be found of the way in which the content of popular superstition in one generation may become the content of science in another. The new dream-book is the textbook ol psychology. This is not the least significant of the results of the work of Freud. Attempts to analyse and interpret dreams in a scientific way were made long before Freud, but it was left to Freud to suggest and to employ a new method of analysis and inter- pretation, and this new method has revolutionized the whole psycho- logical theory of dreams", Dream analysis is said to be of value, not only to the medical practitioner, but also to the clergyman, teacher and parent.

These are strange things to read in a book by an academic psychol- ogist, or at least they would have been so a very few years ago. "We see that no amount of opposition, ignoring and distortion can prevent the new truths from at last beginning to permeate.

There is an appendix of the hundred 'best books* in psychology for the general reader. Twenty-five of these are grouped as classic works. Of the rest, seven (by Brill, Freud [3], Lay, Pfister, and White) are by psycho-analysts, four others (by Hart, Rivers, Tansley, and Trotter) deal extensively with psycho-analysis in a positive sense, and three others (by Adier, Jung and Nicoll) deal with cognate topics. In the index the references to Freud are nearly twice as numerous as those to any other author. All signs of the times.

In conclusion, we may note that, as was perhaps to be expected in a book written north of the Tweed, the subject of sex — surely not an altogether unimportant part of the 'psychology of everyday life' — is dismissed in a single page.

E.J.

MAN'S Unconscious Passion. By Wilfrid Lay, Ph. D. (London, Kegan ir Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd. Pp. 246. Price 10s. 6d.).

Psychoanalysis and Behaviour, By Andr^ Tridon. (New York, Alfred A. Knopf; London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd. Pp. 341. Price 12s. 6d.)

Both of these volumes seek to deal with the application o{ psycho- analytical theory, the first-mentioned to the specific prpblems of sex- passion and emotion in the human being, the second to various mani- festations of human behaviour and their neurotic phases. One is glad to be able to say that, in spite o| this similarity, there is much difference