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When the author was a student 'the psychiatric literature … gave only superficial understanding and confidence'. Hence this book, which opens with an interesting chapter on Personality Development from a biological standpoint and one on Personality Disorders, which give promise of a masterly text-book on Psychiatry. Immediately after this, to our amazement, the work tails off. Descriptions of the psychoses, psychoneuroses (including the anxiety neurosis, by the way), toxic and organic psychoses and constitutional inferiority (amentia) are condensed into seventy-four pages, and many of these are filled with long descriptions of cases. A description of the symptoms of the toxic psychoses in general occupies eleven lines and of the symptoms of general paralysis just over one page. The result is that even cardinal symptoms are frequently not mentioned, e.g. amnesia in the toxic psychoses and pupillary disturbances in general paralysis, except perhaps casually in the case reports.
By the way, we learn that in the State of New York one adult in ten enters a mental hospital at some time of his life and that alcohol accounts for 10 per cent. of mental disorders. This last figure is an example of the extent to which the unconscious can manipulate statistics. It used to be less than 2 per cent. here when alcohol was cheap and unrestricted.