The Autobiography of a Purpose: By William Alanson White. New York: Doubleday Doran & Co., 1938. 273 pp.

Of this volume the author has used a little less than half for a narrative account of his life. The rest of the book is taken up with a description of his major interests and activities. This portion he characterizes as 'the more mature development of the purpose'. In brief this 'purpose' to which he dedicated himself was one of working to help free psychology, consequently psychiatry, from bondage to the sterile materialistic concepts of the nineteenth century and from popular misconceptions, and to gain for it the recognition it should have as one of the biological sciences essential to progress in the study and understanding of the human psyche. The book is written in a simple, yet slightly orotund style. One would almost say that the book could have been written nowhere else than in America.

At the early age of thirty-three, he was made superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D. C. This is the United States Government Hospital for mental and nervous disorders. He just previously had had eleven years of service in the Binghamton State Hospital, Binghamton, New York, where he had had a wide experience and somewhat clearly formulated his 'purpose'. In Washington, Dr. White broke new ground in the matter of hospital administration. He freed himself from much of the drag of the narrow, repressive hierarchy of the traditional staff organization, placed his personnel on its own responsibility, and eventually developed a high grade hospital which served as an important psychiatric training center. He had a keen sense for hampering trends and prejudices and opposed them fearlessly, but in a skilful, unoffending fashion. He was eagerly alert for new outlooks and was one of the first of the psychiatrists in this country to recognize and call public attention to the potentialities of psychoanalysis. The translation of many of the objectives of his 'purpose' into serviceable reality, his administrative accomplishments, and his facility for simple