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In reading a book, a relationship between reader and author is established willy-nilly. This interchange may be more or less conscious. If one likes the book, the relationship becomes prominent in one's mind, and upon finishing the reading, one feels one has established a new friendship if the author was not already a friend. In the present instance Frosch is standing directly in front of the reader
and talking to him or her, for the book is written in a conversational style, and the relationship is immanent.
The total content of the book demonstrates a perspicuous fact. While remaining always a psychoanalyst, Frosch did not lead his life as did most of the analysts of his generation, in their private offices working in isolation with one patient. Frosch always remained active in large psychiatric hospital centers, where he saw the vast panorama of varied clinical material. Only thus could one gain the familiarity with multifarious patients displayed in this work. While the book gains a fast hold on one's attention which it does not relinquish until the job is done, the reviewer would not like to leave the impression that this massive tome is light entertainment for an evening; it requires some diligent reading.
Frosch's product has a feature that commends itself to this reviewer. The entire effort is devoted to the classical psychoanalytic point of view. While the author always keeps an open mind to any theoretical innovation, he is first, foremost, and consistently a Freudian. This makes for clarity, inadvertently demonstrating the remarkable applicability of Freud's thinking to almost all clinical psychiatric syndromes.
In line with the extensive clinical material illustrated in this book, the entire work is oriented around a nosologic scheme. Accordingly the theoretical material reviewed in the first volume is set in a clinical framework. Here one will review the familiar tenets of Freudian theory, from trauma and defense, through the libido theory to the structu