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It is to be hoped that analysts who are concerned with the investigation of 'war-neuroses' will take the trouble to read this book. At the least it will compel them to clarify their own ideas on the subject. This is the more necessary in war-time when, for one reason or another, psychological thinking, research and treatment all tend towards superficiality. No doubt the fact that war neuroses are associated with violent changes in social codes and conditions, to say nothing of unusually severe 'traumatic' experiences, diverts the psychologist's attention to behaviouristic manifestations and mental end-products. Added to which, the energies of a very small band of not too well equipped investigators are naturally taken up with the achievement of quick therapeutic results. However that may be, psychological researches carried out in wartime are uniformly mediocre.
By way of contrast, most of Dr. Kardiner's work was done on chronic cases observed after the last war (up to 1928) and the first part of his book is naturally concerned with their symptomatology. Few will take exception to his clinical summary, or to his emphasis on the fact that, however wide the clinical 'scatter', there is nevertheless a group of symptoms characteristic of the 'traumatic' reaction. Obviously the first problem in research is to identify the mental processes responsible for these syndromes and, if possible, to distinguish them from the symptom formations of the psychoneuroses, the psychoses, psychopathic disturbances of character and abnormal social reactions. As a first step in this direction Dr. Kardiner proceeds to an analysis of the symptomatology. His main concern is with the processes of adaptation. A traumatic neurosis he regards as a special type of adaptation, suddenly initiated after a traumatic experience that has given rise to a diminution of ego resources or a 'contraction of the ego', in particular of 'that portion of the ego which normally helps to carry out certain