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AN ELEMENTARY TEXTBOOK OF PSYCHOANALYSIS, by Charles Brenner. New York: International Universities Press, 1955, 220 pp., $4.00.
Intended for professional workers in psychiatry or fields related to it, this comprehensive account of the development and present status of psychoanalytic theory presupposes no previous knowledge of this field on the part of the reader. There are eight chapters, each followed by suggested reading. The author describes the fundamental hypotheses of psychoanalysis, the drives, the psychic apparatus, parapraxes and wit, dreams, and psychopathology, giving short clinical illustrations where appropriate.
ENERGY AND STRUCTURE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS, by Kenneth Mark Colby. New York: Ronald Press, 1955, ix + 154 pp., $4.50.
According to the author, traditional psychoanalytic theories of psychic energy and structure and their interrelationships are based implicitly upon a nineteenth-century physics which has undergone considerable revision. Colby states that a new hypothetical model of the psychic apparatus which he terms "cyclic-circular" should be useful "not for all psychoanalytic theory but only for the logical and metapsychological interrelating of basic postulates of psychic energy and structure." He believes that the psychoanalytic concept of psychic energy has been too strictly limited to drive energy and offers emendations to the former through considerations "of the general nature of cathexis energy and of the structural nature of drive." He compares his new model with the older "tripartite, two-dimensional" one as to both advantages and disadvantages for psychoanalytic thinking of the interrelationships between psychic energy and structure.
FAITH, REASON AND MODERN PSYCHIATRY. SOURCES FOR A SYNTHESIS, edited by Francis J. Braceland. New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1955, xv + 310 pp., $6.00.
Ten articles by psychiatrists, psychologists, philosophers, and theologicians who by and large attempt to reconcile Catholicism with modern psychi