Mental Healers: Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud.: By Stefan Zweig. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1932. 363 p.

This is a stimulating book about the problem of mental disease and healing by a man who has no medical or psychological training, but a wealth of carefully compiled information, a special direction of interest and great literary skill in presenting his material. He was led to this study, one feels, by his need to formulate his own faith.

The book is a thesis in support of the progress of human enlightenment, and in following it one develops a secondary interest

in the author's unexpressed, perhaps unconscious ideas around the theme.

To the author it seems inevitable that one should turn to the problem of sickness and healing in order to trace evidences of social progress. A state of health, of well-being, is pleasurable, presents no conflicts and does not stimulate desire for change. Pain, on the contrary, is capable of rousing man to sustained efforts to escape from it; efforts whose results comprise the development of medicine. Pain, first referred outward to some inimical force, a hostile god, led to the creation of religion and priests, whose function, by prayers, magic and practical advice was to mediate between man and this force. Later development split the unity of this procedure. The care of the mind or soul continued to be the priest's function; that of the body fell to the physician who sought in material causes the origin of pain.

Once this mind-body split had taken place, "disease was detached from the spiritual personality of man", medical science became "progressively mechanized", until today the modern specialist no longer can combine as did the family doctor, the ancient functions of priest and healer.

Zweig is puzzled by the consequences of this mind-body split. On the one hand, this "mechanized" research has contributed vastly to human knowledge. But knowledge is not therapy and therapy, on the contrary, has achieved some of its most astonishing results when the healer has reunited the mind-body conceptions into a whole. This unified concep