Personal Relationships
- Author:
Florence M.
Surfleet. Allenson, 5/- net. I wish I could recommend this book more warmly. There is an enormous amount that might be helpfully written on the subject ot” personal relationships,?the source of perhaps our greatest happiness and our greatest misery in this world. And modern psychology, based as it is on the intensive study of individuals in their emotional reactions to other people from babyhood upwards, has a wealth of light to shed on problems concerning all degrees of personal relationship from casual contacts to passionate bate and love.
This book is described on the wrapper as “This simple psychology book”, but there is no psychology deserving of the name within the covers. It is not correct to give the title of ” Psychology” to any account of possible emotional reactions and situations couched in any personal terminology. And that is what the book chiefly consists of.
This would, however, be a small point, if these accounts had in them anything of vital, constructive interest and value. One feels, as one reads them, that the writer has no doubt been a tremendous help to numbers of young women, just out of adolescence, chronologically if not mentally, who have brought to her their upsets and difficulties consequent on life in a community of women (a training college?). She has no doubt inspired them with her own deep belief in the value of emotional friendships, whether hetero- or homosexual (but probably chiefly the latter), and has helped them to disentangle some of their practical problems. These problems as set out in a book have, however, taken on an incredible dullness, due to the manner of their presentation. A small quotation picked at random may illustrate what is meant:
“Naturally in any individttal the forccs may work so that over a comparatively long period they may flour in one main direction, and at another period in a rather different direction. When the forccs are lethargic the person finds it difficult often to take decisions or to make effort, whereas when they arc lively and sparkling, quicker movement and greater flexibility may be expected When the forces work unevenly, noiv fast, nozu slow, the person’s behaviour is often greatly influenced by the particular phase through which he (or she) is passing at the moment.”
This is from the chapter called ” The Vital Forces”. Its style is typical of the whole book.
Some of the statements and assumptions are open to serious question. There is an assumption of parallelism between heteroand homosexual attachments, which has no justification psychologically or biologically.
Love relationships between contemporaries of the same or opposite sex, or between child and parent are treated as if they were all fundamentally the same’ thing, the only distinction made being that between ” dynamic” (= passionate?) and “calm”, and that due to the fact that sex expression beyond ” the ordinary caresses and endearments of intimate affection ” is ” taboo ” outside marriage. One cannot feel that such an approach will really help the sexually inverted individual, or the parent-fixed one, to understand and deal with their specific problems, even though one may welcome the absence of prejudice which it suggests.
A disappointing book, written, however, by someone who, one feels, has herself struggled with sincerity and sympathy to help young people. L. H.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.