Searchlights on Delinquency. New Psycho-Analytic Studies, Dedicated to Professor August Aichhorn, on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday: Edited by K. R. Eissler, M.D. and an editorial Board under Paul Federn, M.D., as Chairman. (London: Imago Publishing Co., 1949. Price 30 s.

This volume has been produced by an editorial board of distinguished psychiatrists and psycho-analysts, and the articles appear to have been invited from those who in the past have enjoyed some contact with Aichhorn, and wish in this way to acknowledge their pleasure in all that this meant. The book is therefore primarily an expression of affection and esteem presented to Aichhorn on his seventieth birthday, and secondarily a collection of views on the problems of delinquency. This makes the reviewer's task one of singular difficulty, since it is always an ungracious act to look too critically at the result of a warm-hearted expression of feeling in which one would wish to share.

Though the book is as generous in content as in motive, and contains many articles informative, significant, and penetrating, as a whole it suffers from the defects belonging to the method of its production. For instance, the contributions are by no means representative of all that is being thought, said, and done in the field of delinquency at the present time, and it is apparent that many of the contributors have had little actual experience in dealing with the more serious delinquent who comes up against the law.

The articles, thirty in number, are logically arranged in sections devoted to General Problems, Clinical Problems, Technique and Therapy, Etiology and Development, Social Psychology, and Penology. But the benefit of this tidy arrangement is largely lost owing to many of the authors spreading themselves over more than one theme, and from the amount of repetition encountered in moving from one article to another. The fact, as acknowledged in a foreword, that there are many contradictory views expressed in the different articles is actually more stimulating than disturbing, since there is no pretence that the book can be used as a text-book, and the reader is forced to come to his own conclusions by a process of reflection rather than by uncritical acceptance of everything that