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Professor Mahrer is a Professor of Psychology and Director of Clinical Psychology at Miami University in Ohio. He has collected together the contributions of ten clinical psychologists, all of whom have different approaches to the problems of psychodiagnosis and personality classification. They indicate very clearly their dissatisfaction with their attempts to relate their test results to psychiatric diagnostic categories. Their contributions give a very clear indication of the complexity of the problem, of the present-day doubts and uncertainties of clinical psychologists, about their techniques, and shows the different ways, and in what directions, the subject is opening up.
The three first papers demonstrate the structural approach, with an account of modern factor analysis research of surface and source traits, with the use of the computer, by Raymond Cattell, and an account of the dynamic calculus model for the measurement of motivation in an objective way, by John Horne and Arthur Sweney, with finally, a typological analysis of hospital psychotics, by Maurice Lorr.
H. J. Eysenck presents his views on the dimensions of extraversion-introversion, neuroticism-stability, and his theoretical ideas as to excitation-inhibition balances, and stresses the importance of the inherited neurological, physiological, underlying structures. He links his experimental findings with those of behaviour therapy.
A contrasting paper is that of Timothy Leary presenting an existential transactional approach, stressing the need of flexible testing methods related to the changing psychological situation of the patient, and measurement of such factors as the degree of the patient's commitment and involvement.
Two papers are perhaps of particular interest to analysts and analytically-orientated psychiatrists. The first is that of Reuben Fine, putting forward the view that therapeutic accessibility is perhaps one of the main guides in the choice of patients for analytical treatment, and that