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When, nearly twenty years ago, John Rosen began reporting upon his work with schizophrenic patients, I was among the great number of psychiatrists who felt that a tempestuously fresh wind had begun blowing into what had seemed a dead and stagnant world, and that such exciting things were now happening in that world that it would never be the same again. I still feel that way. Whether grappling with an acutely paranoid man who is armed with a knife, or displaying dazzling virtuosity in dealing with schizophrenic symbolism, Rosen leaves us with an indelible image of something alive happening in this despair-encrusted field. And, although critical studies have called into question the depth and durability of the recoveries achieved by his treatment, solid scientific worth has derived from the sheer circumstance that in no other instance in the history of psychiatry has a therapist permitted his mode of treatment to be studied so directly and so exhaustively as Rosen's has been, and is being, studied. Among the many papers, and the not inconsiderable number of books, which have been devoted to an appraisal of his treatment approach, I recommend Scheflen's (1961) book as a superlative example of the scientific data which this study has yielded, irrespective of whether one approves of the treatment approach under examination.
In this second book of his, Rosen attempts a considerably more sophisticated theoretical formulation than he had reached at the time his first book was published nearly ten years previously. To my mind, the book's most fundamental contribution to theory consists in Rosen's welcome attempt to replace the traditional idea of numerous entities of 'mental disease' with his concept, instead, of different phases of essentially one psychosis. He also expresses what he feels to be the underlying psychodynamic motif, or motivational theme, of each phase. In my reading experience, Arieti (1955) has been the only other writer who has attempted to correlat