Book Reviews

Abstract

ANYONE who has acquainted himself with Dr. R. G. Gordon's larger works on “Personality” and “The Neurotic Personality” will acknowledge the a priori likelihood of his writing a useful and authoritative pamphlet on juvenile delinquency, including the way in which society itself does much to produce its quota of pickers-up of unconsidered trifles. He quotes Samuel Butler to the effect that “Erewhon” a man who catches a disorder is punished, whereas a thief or a rick-burner is sent to a hospital; and the burden of his argument is that Butler's paradox is not so violent as it seems at first sight. We punish the child who marks the wall-paper, instead of giving him materials for the proper exercise of his artistic prowess; we punish the boy who plays football in the street, instead of providing him with a playing-field; and we assume that a girl who has been rescued from a life of infamy is best dealt with by being pitchforked into domestic service or into a public laundry. Dr. Gordon gives a simple and eminently readable account of the social, educational, psychological, and medical factors involved in the treatment of miscreant youth, and he makes a case for the calmly scientific instead of the emotional and half-revengeful methods which at present hold the field.