debtor is so worried that he is unable to bear it any longer; he comes to terms, pays a large sum on account, and gives good security for the remainder. Creditor and debtor then part on the best of terms."

This sort of private arrest with its accompanying starvation duel is now, like the more usual forms of Dharna, prohibited by law.

So commonplace is Dharna to the Hindu that Gandhi's practise of it hardly elicits in India more than passing comment. To the native the psychology of it in the case of this great Nationalist leader is apparent. Gandhi is an unhesitating advocate of Swaraj-"India for the Indians." His program calls for the use of purely native products-native woven cloth, native education, native law. Quite logically, therefore, in spite of his many years of residence abroad, he exercises moral suasion upon his turbulent followers by a method that is also thoroughly Hindu.

The New Psychology Applied to the

Adolescent Girl

CLARENCE C. CHURCH

Chicago, Illinois

Twenty-five years ago the center of interest among students of human nature was the child. Around that time a great literature of books and monographs covering the field of child-study was produced. Parents wrote journals of the lives of their children; babies were studied in laboratories; professors lectured on dolls and playthings. A few years later academic attention had drifted to youth, or the adolescent boy. Practical psychologists studied then boys' clubs and gangs and games for boys. The crowning fruit of this trend was Dr. G. S. Hall's impressive work, Adolescence. Dr. Hall in this work was by no means unmindful of the existence of girls, but, as he says, it is primarily a summary of what we know of the critical 'teen period in boys' lives.

That in the past the scientist and philosopher have not been prone to use their technics for investigating the life of the adolescent girl suggests several reflections. The pedagogical demands for a study of girlhood have never been very great. Only in the past hundred years have girls commonly gone to school, while as pupils today they give far fewer problems in discipline and learn more docilely. But, further, men have historically considered woman an enigma, maybe angelic, maybe demonic-but an enigma. Here the common man and the scholar agreed. Primitive men thought women dangerous, often refusing to have any association with them in public. For instance, an Iroquois warrior would not sit down on a log which had been used by a maiden for a seat. In some South Pacific Ocean tribes the women spoke special languages and lived ever in separate abodes. St. Crysostom thought woman " a wicked work of nature covered over with a shining varnish," and for five hundred years the scholars and priests of the early church agreed with him. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the common way of deal

ing with the ambitious girl or woman was to pronounce her a witch and put her to death. According to one estimate during those periods in Europe a million young women were so punished. And half a century ago in America a public man could safely declare that a girl needed to learn only enough geography to enable her to get about her house and enough chemistry for making bread. Even our enlightened Emerson would probably have smiled at a scientific study of the adolescent girl. Why study her when she was so easily put aside?

But in the year 1918 there were in the United States 1,168,000 girls in high school, and maybe 3,000,000 in wage or salary earning occupations.1 This really remarkable situation, viewed in historical perspective, has made of the adolescent girl a problem which it is no longer possible to neglect.

And recently there have been appearing numerous books on girls and on the various relationships of girlhood, such as those of club and social organization, of school life, and vocational needs and circumstances. The dozen or so of these which have come into my hands all seem modern in spirit, interesting, and practically instructive. But they appear usually to have been written from the viewpoint of common sense and experience in teaching or in Y. W. C. A. work rather than from the standpoint of extensive psychological training.2

But now comes an investigator who has brought to her undertaking the technic and point of view of that last variety of psychology, psychoanalysis, and the inspiration of Dr. G. S. Hall and Clark University. This investigator is Miss Phyllis Blanchard, Ph. D. A glance into her book, The Adolescent Girl; A Study from the Psychoanalytic Viewpoint, will convince anyone that it is a very interesting and a new kind of monograph. No account of it can do it full justice on these

scores.

3

1 These figures are for adolescent girls. The female population was 151,000. It is assumed that all high school girls are adolescents. 1920 figures for girls in industry are not yet available.

Mary E. Moxcey's Girlhood and Character is one exception here. This book shows broad scholarship as well as fruitful experience in group work with girls. However, its plan is not original.

Published by Moffat, Yard & Co, New York, 242 pp., 1920.

But the cautious thinker may object to psychoanalysis as a point of approach to normal human problems. Is not this thing a mere fad of erratic academicians? Is not psychonalysis to the book worm what radio just now is to the boy and the theory of relativity to the natural scientist? Consider, someone says, how authorities on this brand of psychology so often choose the most complicated of two equally plausible explanations-a course not favored in logic. Reflect on the vagueness of European writers in the field. Note how their American disciples frequently astound one with a brilliant sophistry which sets the most familiar facts in the strangest light. And can anyone read our popular expounders of psychoanalysis without being convinced that he is a neurotic many times over and wondering whether there is any distinction between the normal and the abnormal. Think, too, of the number of species of psychoanalysts-followers of Freud, adherents of Adler, disciples of Jung. Perhaps no two individuals of the genus talk alike.

Yet after reading and pondering long, and struggling bravely with the new dialect of these writers-for their abundant new terminology amounts to such-a reflective person believes there is such a thing as sane psychoanalysis, if some of its authorities do seem insane. Then he can thank the psychoanalyst for his strategic rear-guard attack on academic prudery. He will be especially thankful for a few American psychoanalytic books in which the faults noticed in the preceding paragraph are not very numerous. When he picks up Dr. Blanchard's book and sees how it makes definite the sounder concepts of psychoanalysis by showing straightforwardly their working in the life of girlhood he will be especially pleased.

According to our author, living organisms in general are animated by an irresistible energy-the élan vital, hormé, willto-live, libido. These terms, made famous by different philosophers, mean much the same. The Freudians prefer libido, and mean by it any passionate or enthusiastic attitude. Sexual desire and the wish for self-assertion (or the will to power)

For instance, The Proceedings of the International Conference of Women Physicians, vols. IV and V. The Woman's Press 600 Lexington Ave., New York, Papers by Drs. Burrow, Lollini, MacCurdy, Frink, Hall, Hinkle, Dooley, Long.

constitute two important outlets of the libido. These have an especial significance for the inner or affectional life. Ordinarily the will to power has not so large a place in the girl's affectional life as have the various wishes connected with her rôle in the reproduction of the race. She is more the feeling type, more self-sacrificing, and contrasts in this respect with the boy in whom the wish for power and position looms greater.

This tendency in the girl comes out during early adolescence in half-conscious attempts to attract attention from the other sex, of which giggling and her insatiate interest in dress are familiar examples. In the grip of her new impulses she is intensely sensitive to her associates, liking and hating in extremes and for the slightest causes, craving sympathy however obtained, determined to have recognition of any kind she can understand. From long and intimate acquaintance with representative girls in college Dr. Blanchard has learned the inner lives and attitudes of normal girls as these are not often learned. Enough of these are related in the girls' own words to convey clear notions of the fantastic aspirations of this adolescent period. Plainly girls differ much in their fancies and day dreams, and develop romantic attitudes at very different ages. But certainly love in some of its innumerable forms is the center of girlish reveries.

Around this interest many of the difficulties of adolescence lurk. First, the girl finds so little that will enlighten or guide her romantic fancies. True, literature and the drama deal unceasingly with love, but in obscure and unreal ways that confound as much as they aid. Dr. Blanchard turns to the scientists and philosophers to see what they have discovered about it. The scholars think clearly and plainly, whatever their other faults. They find and analyze a large sensual or physical element in the attraction of sex; but they think that in addition to this, in any union at all permanent, there ought to be interests, ideas, and ideals held comradely together by the parties. Further, and important, a love which is worth anything to the race will be not merely a selfishly enjoyed relation between the lovers, in which one administers to the