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Psycho-analysts are often criticized for being unduly stand-offish in their attitude toward the systematic treatises of non-analytical colleagues. It is implied that they are unable to find virtue in any book which is not grounded on broad psycho-analytical lines. The fact is, however, that most analysts would be only too grateful to adopt any work of clinical description or classification provided it fulfilled one reasonable condition, viz., that it should not give more trouble than it is worth. There are a number of descriptive fields, in particular the fields of characterology and type-psychology, which have been neglected by psycho-analysts, either because they had no leisure time in which to classify exhaustively the descriptive clinical material or because they regarded the accepted clinical pictures as misleading. It would certainly be a boon to the working analyst to have this material classified and correlated in a satisfactory clinical system. Such work would correspond with the work of clinical psychiatrists on 'syndromes'.
Up to the present it is the exception to find any systematic text-book on either psychiatry or character pathology which comes up even to the meagre standard I have indicated. The great majority of writers either take refuge in grandiose complexity or combine simplicity with a weak superficiality.
The present book unfortunately belongs to the first category. It purports to be a modest clinical summary of the psychopathies, but the