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The stated aim of this book is to trace the development of psychotherapeutic methods from Freud down to the modern psycho-analysts, analytical psychologists, and group therapists, and to make clear the connection between the main divergences of theory and what the practitioners actually do to their patients. This is an ambitious project to attempt in a short book, and although it does not succeed in its aims it contains a good deal of useful material. It will appeal to the intelligent layman, general practitioner, and student of psychology, for whom it is primarily written. The practising analyst is likely to find much of it superficial and to be irritated by the author's apparent satisfaction with the results of his attempts to be scientific.
He divides the methods of remedial medicine into semantic and non-semantic techniques, which has some advantages, but which misses the important point that many methods of physical treatment in psychiatry, including insulin coma, may very well have a large, or even exclusive, semantic element in them. He then gives definitions of “science” and “technique” and proceeds to fit pyschotherapy into the second category. Psychotherapy, then, is a technique, which draws heavily on the science of pyschology. Psychiatry, “if it makes good progress and does not misbehave, will one day be worthy of the name of science”. Again, there is some value in this division, and this emerges in the interesting introductory chapter. However, its disadvantages are considerable. The pejorative connotations of the word technician lead people to talk of psychotherapy as an art; the author quickly disposes of this notion. Unfortunately the view of the therapist as a technician is even less satisfactory than that of him as an artist, and his attempts to be logical seem to have led the author to empty out the baby with the bath-water. Even if his definition of technique as a collection of rules for achieving a certain class of objectives is accepted, and its