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Silvano Arieti, the editor of this journal, is one of the few ongoing Renaissance men in American psychiatry and psychoanalysis currently. He currently seems at his creative peak, with new works edited and written by him coming out frequently. Gerard Chrzanowski is a very valuable co-editor of this work, and in addition, a contributor of the scholarly chapter “Recent Advances in Concepts and Treatment of Borderline Cases.”
This volume is a beautiful example of superb editorial choices, original articles, and this psychoanalytic “world view” or interface.
The first section of the text, with some nine original contributions on “Social Environment,” was the most exciting portion of “New Dimensions in Psychiatry.” Here various, mainly foreign, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts interweave culture and its effect on psychopathology in a most skillful way. Ashley Montagu writes a most masterful article on “Sociogenic Brain Damage,” and John Calhoun represents his important work on the effect of crowding on emotional health. Franceso Simone writes a superb article on the effect of cultural change in the mysterious (to Americans) isle of Sardinia. Guilt, changing values, and rural-urban transformations lead to the recrudescence of interesting hysterical and culturally indigenous psychopathology; sig., the effect of the “evil eye” and other “magical” phenomena. Fangel writes the most comprehensive paper I've yet read on the relationship of culture, the economic and political milieu, and the health delivery system in relation to psychopathology — in this case in a country small enough to be studied discreetly and completely, Norway, de Molina writes a quite original analytic paper on the relationship of culture to the work, the practice of a female analyst. This, incidentally, is far and away the best article I've read in the lay or professional press on how women mental-health clinicians are acted upon and influenced by the culture (in this case Spain). Issues such as counter-tra