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For many years Dr. Schilder's position in the scientific world of neuropsychiatry has been an outstanding one. Years before his leaving the Vienna Clinic his contributions to organic neurology, to psychiatry, to philosophy, and to the many borderline states all stamped him as an individual of exceptional qualifications and his coming to be Clinical Director of the new Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital was considered by most as a rare bit of good management on the part of Dr. M. S. Gregory, then Chief of the Psychiatric Division at Bellevue. Time has justified in full measure this choice and a numerous and valuable collection of studies have come from Dr. Schilder and his associates in the hospital.
The present work on psychotherapy is one of his more recent and larger contributions and merits close attention and study and perhaps a little adverse criticism viewed from a strictly orthodox psycho-analytic viewpoint. Schilder, largely because of his very thorough grounding in neurology, his early contacts with the Wernicke point of view in psychiatry, his own work on hypnosis, his psycho-analytic activities in Vienna with the Vienna group, has been an individual and not a rubber stamp. No matter what subject he has written upon he has something vital to say. His earlier ingenious and stimulating work on the 'Body Scheme' shewed him as having a definite attitude towards psycho-somatic problems which penetrate deeply into all that he writes.
There is a refreshing definiteness about his attitude to psychotherapy which he would make a 'science' with precise formulations and intelligent groundwork rather than the rather loose series of contacts known as an intuitive art. This accent we find salutary, especially since the inruption into the psychiatric field of the mob of social workers, clinical psychologists, psychological pedagogues and the riff-raff of charlatans and semi-charlatans all ready to 'clear up one's conflicts', 'give one assurance', 'overcome self-consciousne