THE HUMAN PERSONALITY
By Louis Berg, M.D.
A jacket covered with catch-penny questions is hardly a fair index to a book's contents, and the judicious may -well ignore it. Possibly the English publishers of Dr. Louis Berg's book, The Human Personality (Williams and Norgate, 8s. 6d.) felt called upon to assist the author in his endeavours to give the subject " pep." Their enterprise is to be deplored, however, for, once one has got past the exuberance of his language, Dr. Berg gives a sober if somewhat .obvious account of the info-. ences which determine personality, the efforts of the individual to adjust himself to his environment, and the chief contem- porary schools of medical psychology. Occasionally his phraseology is as startling as his examples. It is odd to find Little Eva, of Uncle Turn's Cabin, called as witness, quite apart from being told that she " heralds a thymic dominance " later in life. The following is a fair example of Dr. Berg's manner. " Much flapperism ' and license—which ninny so- called modern women mistake for freedom—is due to over- secretion of pituitrin. These girls and young women are the thrill-seekers and the personalities dominated by a feverish desire ' to go places and do things.' . They seldom know what they really want : they are hying driven by something within them towards a goal they cannot visualize ; they cannot sit still in their furims twenties and foolish thirties. Often the orgy of secretion ' burns out' the posterior gland, and then they enter the fatuous forties to become placid-eyed, gentle and well-behaved matrons who look back with tolerance, and yet with regret, upon the madcap follies of their mauve decade." At the same time, there is a certain amount of valuable material in the book, and the account of modern psychological theory is usually sound if uninspired.
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