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The author has attempted a comprehensive survey of treatment in psychiatry with a review of various useful approaches and recommendations for their application. The central theme is 'Psychobiology', and the author states in the preface, after giving due credit to other sources, that 'this whole book is based on the teaching and methods of treatment of Dr. Adolf Meyer'. This systematic presentation of Meyerian psychiatry is, as the author wished, the most valuable contribution of the book. He is successful in making treatment the main feature, although he has also been able to introduce sufficient psychopathology to make it a fairly comprehensive textbook on psychiatry as well. It is a book that can be profitably read by psychiatrists and medical students, and it gives references useful for the general practitioner and medical specialist.
For the analyst there is a special interest and challenge in the author's attempts throughout the book to bring about a solution of psychobiology and psychoanalysis. This is only partially successful, the result being more in the nature of an emulsion. The effort however is praiseworthy and deserves constructive criticism. As this aspect of the book is the most important for the psychoanalyst, more space will be given to it, at the risk of seeming to be biased or to neglect other interesting and valuable contributions.
That the author is concerned about the important problem of a satisfactory inclusion of psychoanalytic contributions, one gathers from the opening paragraph of the preface: 'With the development of dynamic psychiatry, the physician found it necessary to concern himself not only with the disease pattern of a case but also with the personality in which it appeared. Although a beginning has been made, much remains to be done to bring about a satisfactory union of both methods of approach. Both the teacher and the practicing physician have a tendency to stress one or the other mode of procedure. Books, too, rarel