Psychology without Tears
ONE of the most notable features in almost every department of science has been the recent trend away from the materialism of the last couple of generations. It seems to have begun in the realm of the physicists and has recently been exemplified in the fields of anatomy, biology and medicine by such books as Professor Wood Jones's Life and Living and Design and Purpose and Mr. Kenneth Walker's Diagnosis of Man. It is equally evident in the pages of Dr. Henry Yellowlees's Out of Working Hours, written from the standpoint of what might be called by some people modern psychology. It is true that Dr. Yellowlees seems to assume that this is "based on foundations as remorselessly and scientifically accurate as mathematics," which is a trifle more, perhaps, than many of his medical brethren would concede. But, on the other hand, he emphasises, over and over again, the limita- tions of the purely scientific approach to truth in his own speciality. He, too, maintains that there are orders of knowledge, particularly in the sphere of values, that are just as valid but only to be obtained through other channels and by other means. Indeed, he holds that the relative failure, in actual practice, of so much modern psycho- logical and psycho-analytic treatment is because many of its ex- ponents have failed to realise this. Philosophically, as he puts it, they are still living in the 189o's.
Included in his book are wise and humorous addresses to nurses and social workers, and also his Morison Lectures in Edinburgh of 1939 on the problems of adolescence. These deservedly created widespread attention at the time, and it is delightful to be able to read them again in their present form. Dr. Yellowlees has ranged over wide pastures in his general reading and studies and he shows incidentally how true and beautiful a picture of normal adolescence is to be found in the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden. The thoughtless reception of the everyday needs of life is followed by the first desire for knowledge, then by the questioning of authority, the realisation of sex, and finally, as the garden gates are closed for ever, by the need for work in the outside world. It is the path that every boy and girl must tread, hardly aware of all that has been happening to them until it has come to an end. But it is during this period that the pattern of their future outlook and attitude to
life is very largely determined ; and Dr. Yellowlees stresses how profoundly it may be affected by parents and teachers. To their unwisdom, for example, may well be due many of the aberrations of later sexual behaviour—less perhaps because of anything actually said than of the emotional background behind the explanations. Nobody is quicker than a child to sense and exploit any hint of concealment, whether garbed in over-solemnity or uneasy jocularity. On the other hand, if a phallus is described as unemotionally as a tea-cup, there is no particular reason for chalking up a picture of it on a wall.
Throughout adolescence, too, boys and girls are peculiarly sug- gestible; and a lifelong self-distrust may easily be sown by an Olympian or over-protective father or mother. To this may be traced many of the morbid anxieties or anxiety neuroses of adult life, the subject of a later address in this volume to R.A.M.C. officers in France. This was the basic ingredient of many of the illnesses labelled in the last war as disorderly action of the heart and shell- shock. Neither the heart nor the shell had very much to do with them. But the war had produced conditions in which the sufferers could no longer deal with their self-uncertainty. It could not be masked by some convenient avoidance. Hence the physical signs of distress. The war, like the present war, had not created these sufferers. It had merely revealed them, and too often, alas! the spiritual surroundings in which they had been brought up. Touch- ing this, Dr. Yellowlees, as one of our most experienced psychiatrists, has a last word to say. "Psychologically speaking, we emerge from the dark at one end of life only to re-enter it at the other, and the great distinguishing mark, as I believe, of the psychologically well-equipped individual is the ever-present sense that the dark is somehow friendly." It is not the duty of the scientist and psycho- logist, as he sees it, to try and personify this friendly dark. But the sense that it is so should be the bright treasure of every adolescent and the best guarantee for his psychological future. "We may regard it," he says, "as the new song put into his mouth. We need not study the words and music too critically • it is the fact
that he is singing that matters." H. H. BastiFolus.
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