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This is an ambitious work which attempts to attack the problem of schizophrenia and its treatment in toto by physiological means. All medical disciplines, from surgery to psycho-analysis, combine to pool their resources.
The authors were led to believe that the septal region of the forebrain was the influencing area in schizophrenia and severe emotional disease. The book contains a thorough documentation based on electrode stimulation, with extensive studies on animal and human subjects, complete with laboratory data. Briefly, they think that certain pathways constitute a hypothetical circuit that facilitates mental and bodily processes, while others suppress activity. It must be remembered that the report is a preliminary one.
The authors at first accept psycho-analytic psychology as the psychology of mental processes, and then ignore it, especially in evaluating their results. In a series of twenty patients, eleven were described as improved where a control series would only produce four. In the case histories offered, there seems to have been a remission in libidinal regression, the more normal part of the ego seems to have a tenuous hold, but the modified psychotic ego is in evidence. The improved patients live a marginal existence.
Psycho-analytic literature has described the modified, deformed ego of the psychotic. Although 'social cures' are very important, it would have been of inestimable value if the authors had described the superiority of their method over others in terms of structural change that had occurred.