Clifford Yorke, Stanley Wiseberg, Thomas Freeman: Development and Psychopathology — Studies in Psychoanalytic Psychiatry. Published by  Yale University Press. £22.50.

Freud was always interested in psychiatry. In fact, he was on the whole quite happy to use the then current psychiatric classification of mental illnesses, and saw psychoanalysis as a treatment method within that wider discipline. Since his time the major developments in both psychoanalytic thinking and the increasing sophistication of psychiatric classification has led to a wide divergence of thinking between the two. Such is the current situation that it is often difficult to relate the concepts of one to those of the other, and some would think that this is a loss to both. In particular psychoanalytic thinking has found it increasingly difficult to find an acceptable nosology. Gone are the once frequent diagnoses of hysterical or obsessional neurotic states. Now cases tend to be formulated around a core conflict described in terms of the diagnostician's particular theoretical orientation. This move away from classification may be inevitable, but what tends to be lost is any specificity about the severity and psychopathology of the case.

All the authors of this book are psychoanalysts with wide experience in psychiatry and one of their purposes is to re-establish the connection between the psychiatric conceptualisation of mental illness and the developmental perspective that is based on classical psychoanalytic concepts. Of particular interest are the chapters on psychotic conditions and a group brought together by the authors under the heading of “Non-neurotic developmental disorders”. The latter is a rather mixed bag of disturbances of varying severity that are neither psychotic, nor primarily due to conflict and compromise formation. What they have in common, in the author's view, is that they have an early developmental deficit due to either environmental or constitutional causes. In effect, these individuals