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The author, Professor Emeritus of Medicine at Johns Hopkins and as the dust cover informs us, 'one of America's most prominent medical men', has set out to tell us in this book what he has learned from thirty years of 'systematic' practice of psychotherapy. To this reviewer it appears that what the professor has learned adds up precisely to zero, and it is a great pity that he has elected to take 218 pages to document what he could have made clear in one brief, bald statement of fact.
Must we be told, for instance, that after thirty years the professor is still 'teaching' the neurasthenic 'to disregard disagreeable sensations, to avoid excessive strains and exhausting emotions [as if the neurasthenic does anything else] and to cultivate a state of greater confidence in his body'? Must it be made painfully clear to us that after thirty long years the kernel of the author's approach to 'paranoiacs' has boiled down to the following: 'It should be explained to the patient that he needs to understand others—their motives, personalities and reactions—better than he does; if he can be taught to study these, he may become more tolerant and be led to see that the ideas he has harbored have been misinterpretations'?
Not content to rest his case on a few sample expositions of theory and a case history or two for form's sake, the professor goes on—almost compulsively, we fear—to demonstrate in every department