The book “Our Inner Conflicts,” by the German writer Mrs. Karen Horney, examines the kinds of neurotic aberration and their causes, and pictures for us, with living examples drawn from the heart of life, the complication and entanglement which social life in the present age has reached in the manifold avenues of living. It shows us the effect of these external factors on people's souls, and the inner conflict that arises from them — a conflict that often ends in a violent psychic neurosis, which later becomes a psychological deviation and an aberration in social relations.

The importance of “Our Inner Conflicts” rests, in the first place, on the author's distinguished standing in world scientific circles. Mrs. Karen Horney, German by origin, graduated as a physician in psychology from the University of Berlin in 1913, and from her marriage to Oskar Horney was blessed with three daughters... She then emigrated with her family to the United States and settled in New York, and since 1932 she has not ceased to lecture in social and psychological studies. She is now vice-president of the Psychoanalysis University and an active member of a number of organizations that aim at the advancement of modern psychology.

Karen Horney has a number of works, the most important of which are:

1. Neurotic Personality of Our Time 2. New Ways in Psychoanalysis 3. Self-Analysis 4. And finally, “Our Inner Conflicts,” which we are about to discuss, and which is rightly counted the cream of the knowledge she has attained in this virgin field, and of the valuable experience brought to her by the very practice of her medical profession.

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In searching out the causes of neurotic aberration, the author says:

It is not easy to trace the causes of neurotic aberra-tion in people. But there are signs and indications apt to point to the aspects of this aberration, such as a person's departing from the ordinary in his behavior, and his falling prey to severe exhaustion at the least work he performs... And the firmer our knowledge of people and our close contact with them, and

the wider our study of their psychologies and their behavior, the better this helps us to arrive, together with them, at the desired results.

Much of the activity of educators and psychologists at the present time is directed, in breadth and in depth, toward lifting the veil from the secrets of this science and reaching a solution of these psychological complexes and nervous conflicts that turn a man's nature upside down and make of him a fettered slave, led by their bonds without any will of his own. Freud, who traces every act a man performs back to a sexual factor, looks upon this problem with a pessimistic eye and sees little hope of its cure. But the author is more optimistic: she hopes for cure, so long as man is alive and continues to grow.

It is known that every strange phenomenon in a person's conduct has an antecedent, or antecedents, among events that exerted a direct or indirect influ-ence in giving him this direction — a direction that may become aberrant, and take on, with the passage of time, one of three forms: moving toward people, moving against people, and fleeing from people.

And as the author comes to enumerate the cases of neurotic aberration common in this age, she lays stress on these three types, speaking in detail of their signs and their consequences, so as to make it easy for the reader to trace them and recognize them wherever they are found.

Among the traits of those who move toward people is that they feel their own weakness and helplessness and so seek strength from those who possess it. They submit before them, declaring their complete obedience, surrendering to the will of others — the strong among people,

or those who have counted themselves strong and so appeared in the guise of might and leadership, deservedly or undeservedly... These people court the affection of others, and they are forever in need of a word of encouragement; their utmost goal is success in finding a companion, be it a husband or a friend... They are extremely sensitive, agitated at the slight-est gesture, their nervous system thrown into disor-der — and that because they have little confidence in their capacities and in themselves. In short, the per-sons afflicted with this aberration do the impossible