Addiction: Isidor Chein, Donald L. Gerard, Robert S. Lee, Eva Rosenfeld: The Road to H, New York:  Basic Books, 1964,  469 pp.

This is probably the most intensive and extensive study of narcotic use that has been published in this generation. It strikes a balance between sociologic and psychologic treatment. One of the authors—Donald L. Gerard—is a psychoanalyst, and interesting use is made of psychoanalytic concepts of addiction.

In the presentation of heroin use by young people and the comparison with a control group, the significant theories of drug use are presented and critically discussed. The psychoanalytic theories and especially Rado's brilliant formulation of drug use as a method of bypassing genitality is given less attention than many psychoanalytic readers would like. But the strength of the book lies in its very eclecticism and catholicity. There is intensive discussion of personality characteristics of narcotic users and of their families. The discussion of the family background is especially acute, relating addiction to ego structure, defective superego, inadequate masculine identification and unrealistic level of aspiration. The brief discussion of the female addict is very suggestive. Addicts of both sexes tended to have character disorders.

The authors are not content with carefully explicating their data. They directly face the issue of social control of drug use and discuss a wide range of proposals for regulating such use. The detailed case histories that are presented provide a backdrop against which the recommendations of the authors can be understood. These recommendations seem to be directed less to the professional reader than to the intelligent layman. But both intelligent laymen and the professional reader will profit from the skillful presentation of the data in this book. The psychoanalytic reader must still await an integration of the theories of Freud, Rado, Wittels, Nyswander, Chessick, and others whose work has brought us closer to an understanding of the psychodynamics of the addict and of addiction.

One of the encouraging aspects of recent work in drug addi