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DR. WATSON HAS DRAWN upon his own unique experience in the fields of both law and psychiatry to produce a book that should be a useful tool for lawyers, and at the same time is a useful manual for everyone who is interested in learning about basic psychoanalytic concepts. A psychiatrist, Dr. Watson was selected by the National Institute of Mental Health in 1955 for a unique role—service on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. His exposure there to legal concepts and legal problems has resulted in his present dual role of Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.
Although lawyers, judges, and courts have constantly to deal with behavioral problems, courses in the behavioral sciences are not available in law schools. The lawyer is trained in the legal effects and implications of particular human behavior—but for an understanding of human behavior, why people do what they do, and the probabilities of future behavior in particular situations, he is left to his own experience, "common sense, " and intuition.
Dr. Watson has provided lawyers and other readers with an excellent basic book on psychoanalysis and other areas of psychiatry. He has also succeeded in translating psychiatric and psychoanalytic jargon into ordinary English, thus scaling the barriers of technical nomenclature which create formidable problems in other books.
In his years at law school, Dr. Watson became familiar with the many phases of a lawyer's practice in which behavioral problems arise, and in which an understanding of psychiatry and psychotherapy can be particularly useful in reaching a desirable resolution of the problems, as, for example, criminal cases, custody situations, dealing with the aged, incompetency proceedings, juvenile delinquency, and so forth. As he deals with particular phases of psychoanalysis, he outlines fact situations that find their way into a law office and discusses the problem of how to deal with them.
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