Psychology is about People
- Author:
Eysenck
Allen Lane. The Penguin Press, ?3.50 In this book Eysenck presents a solution to modern social problems, namely that his own particular branch of behaviourist psychology can offer modern civilization a way out of its social dilemmas. Education, psychiatry, sexuality, pornography and political attitudes are considered in turn. Social action, Eysenck argues, should take account of inborn differences of personality and intelligence.
Thus, the selective principle should govern schooling, political attitudes should be recognised as partly unmodifiable, and introverts and extroverts as having different sexual needs. Within such limits, however, the manipulation of stimulus and reward (conditions) could eliminate undesirable behaviour in schools, psychiatric hospitals and even failing mariages.
To those concerned with mental health, probably the chapters on psychiatric problems and on sexuality have most relevance. On the first, for example, Eysenck’s account of psychotic conditions seems dangerously misleading.
Psychotics are described as cruel and inhumane’, as ‘liking to make fools of other people and to upset them” and as ‘combining an extreme degree of promiscuity with an extreme degree of hostility to their sex partners’. It is hard to recognise a typical schizophrenic or severely depressed patient in such a description.
Eysenck’s treatment also adds little to our understanding of the relation between sexual adjustment and mental health. Sexuality is discussed entirely without references to its context of human relationships?this, despite the claim that ‘psychology is about people’.
The book is aimed at the layman, and is written in a readable, often jocular style. It seems unlikely however, to make a major contribution to the average person’s understanding of mental health.
Phillida Salmon
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