| Summary: | "Thinking, in the form of perception, may be approached through the studies of familiar categories, such as space perception, time perception, the reading process, illusions, and other experiences in which something like an elementary form of inference may be discerned. Thinking, in the form of argument, reasoning and scientific induction, may be approached through the inquiries of logic and methodology. Or, as a momentary and complex experience, thought may be investigated by the systematic methods of introspection as these have developed in the history of psychology. In this volume, instead, thought is approached through the phenomena of sleep, drowsiness and the dream. The best justification of this approach will be found in whatever positive contribution the study is found to make to an understanding of "the higher mental processes." Of the many problems left unsolved, and the topics omitted, no one is more painfully aware than is the author. The book differs from most recent applications of dream observations, in that it finds but scant scientific value in the cherished assertions of the Freudian psychology. But while its attitude toward the Libido, the Unconscious, Symbolism, the Sexual Theory, and Infantilism is entirely sceptical, it seeks nevertheless to indicate and to apply such sober contributions as have from time to time appeared in the literature of "psychoanalogy," in its relation to dreaming, to meaning, and to thinking. The whole literature of this movement, from Herbart, its founder, through Freud, its expositor, to Rivers' recent adaptations of its principles, has a suggestive value, however unscientific its technique and method. Emphasis is laid throughout the book on the mechanism of "redintegration" as a descriptive and explanatory principle of mental phenomena"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).
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