When Temperaments Clash
- Author:
Murdo Mackenzie. Thomas Murby & Co. 7/6 net.
This is a pleasant book written by one who is in daily contact with those in need of psychological treatment and who, moreover, obviously loves his fellow-men. A gentle sense of fun pervades the text of this very human book.
The motif throughout is the author’s axiom that our ability to perform to capacity depends upon our relations with other humans and not on sheer skill or dexterity. He urges that the effect of intimate human contacts upon the nervous system is becoming a serious problem now that civilisation has rendered the race so highly sensitive. He points out that just as social knowledge led the way to the abolition of physical cruelty so must knowledge of psychology lead away from mental cruelty.
In a series of pleasing and, in many ways, original chapters on temperament, the most important of which are headed ” Defence ” and ” Release “, he weaves through the pages a simple outline of practical psychology. To do this he takes concrete examples of persons in various trades and professions and having pictured the forces that bear in upon them in their daily life, shows how the worker in question can best deal with his difficulties. He demonstrates, in fact, the necessity of self-knowledge and stresses the wisdom of searching for one’s life work along the lines of mental capacity.
This is a book which can be read by all with benefit and it is pleasing to see in it no word that could harm or worry an overanxious person, a very important matter in a psychological treatise intended for members of the public.
A criticism that may be made is that the book is too concentrated and word}’ and many examples given when one would have sufficed. The text is not, therefore, always easy to follow and suffers here and there from repetition. The author seems to have been carried away by his own enthusiasm and his evident wish to make his pages applicable to every type of reader.
Emslie Hutton.
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