PROBLEMS OF PERSONALITY, STUDIES PRESENTED TO DR. MORTON PRINCE, PIONEER
IN AMERICAN PSYCHOPATHOLOGY. (Regan Paul and Co. 18s. net.)
Tins volume, composed by various writers on various subjects in honour of the first editor of the Journal of Abnormal Psy- chology, is a good example of the genus " Festschrift." Of its twenty-four contributors fourteen are American, seven British, two Swiss and one French, and the subjects and the style of the papers are even more various than the nationalities of their authors. They embrace a good deal of psychology, medical and general, a great deal of psycho-analysis, for and against, but curiously little that carries on the tradition of Dr. Prince's brilliant studies in the " dissociation " of human personality. Presumably the reason is that opportunities hie that presented by the famous " Beauchamp Case " arise but rarely. As is usual in such books, the papers vary a good deal in importance and interest ; the most attractive, perhaps, is an incisive criticism of the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis, by Dr. H. H. Goddard, which concludes that " the unconscious, as conceived by the psycho-analyst, does not exist," and so cannot explain anything. The general reader, however, will be specially interested by Dr. C. L. Dana's attempt to discover from the recorded signatures of Shakespeare by what disease the poet was finally afflicted. After acquitting him of paralysis agitans, paresis, tabes, alcoholism and writer's cramp, he decides that " a thrombotic condition affecting his left mid- brain and disturbing the automatic association mechanisms of that region would explain his defective signatures." But in arriving at this conclusion he sets aside the work of eminent " palaeontologists " (sic !) like Sir E. Maunde Thompson, in a way that would have rejoiced the heart of Mrs. Malaprop
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