Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Vol.  2. 2nd Edition. 2 vols. Ed. by Alfred M. Freedman, Harold I. Kaplan, and Benjamin J. Sadock. Baltimore:  The Williams & Wilkings Company, 1975.

Monumental and encyclopedic are appropriate adjectives for this roughly three-thousand-page, two-volume work, which is comprised of articles by 236 contributors “representing the leaders in psychiatry and related behavioral scientific disciplines” (p. v.). Their approach is that, as the American society is pluralistic and pragmatic, so it was desirable in a comprehensive psychiatric text to be inclusive and eclectic, not selective. “It is hoped that this textbook will be an organizing statement for the multitude of relevant variables and an initial approach for a complex model. More parsimonious statements must await further research and developments in the field” (p. vi).

Starting with a detailed statement of historical and theoretical trends in psychiatry, the book follows with chapters on such areas as the contributions of other sciences to the science of human behavior, cultural and interpersonal psychoanalytical schools, the psychiatric interview and diagnosis; a seven-hundred-page section on etiology, symptomatology, epidemiology, treatment methods, and their effectiveness on each psychiatric disorder, following the classification scheme of DSM II; and many other major sections, e. g., a group of articles describing each of the more widely practiced psychotherapies.