An Introduction to Psychology

Susan Isaacs's first book, published under the name Susan S. Brierley. Its preface says it was written to meet the first needs of non-professional students of psychology, especially those in Workers' Educational Association classes, and from a point of view in harmony with a biological outlook. Part I sets out the scope and method of psychology: its definitions, methods and fields of inquiry. Following William McDougall, Isaacs takes psychology to be the study of behaviour understood as purposive activity. She accepts the findings of behaviourism but rejects John B. Watson's psychology without consciousness. Part II takes up general problems: the 'wish', organism and environment, and three chapters on instinct and intelligence. It closes with a chapter on the conscious and the unconscious. There she presents the unconscious as made up of repressed wishes, and argues that the conflict leading to repression, though it seems to set the child against the outer world, is from the start an internal one. She ranks sublimation above reaction formation as an outcome of such conflict, and reports the Freudian view that the unconscious consists mainly of infantile sexuality. A reading list, which includes Freud's On Dreams, ends the book.