Psychobiology and Psychiatry

By Wendell Muncie, M.D. St. Louis: The C. V. Mosby Company, 1939. 739 pp.

A HANDBOOK OF ELEMENTARY PSYCHOBIOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY. By Edward G. Billings, M.D. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1939. 271 pp.

The two figures which have most profoundly influenced the development of American psychiatry in the first half of the century have been undoubtedly those of Adolf Meyer and Freud. If we contrast these two men, certain striking differences come to the surface. Freud worked in splendid isolation for almost fifteen years before he presented the main body of his ideas to the scientific world. He checked again and again his hypotheses on his clinical material and on his students before he published his ideas. The initial hostility which he met in Vienna after he returned from France made him go into retreat, and perhaps accounts for the maturation of his ideas without interference of academic intrigues, personal entanglements, or even active contact with other schools of thought, as he put it in his autobiography. Meyer was more fortunate. His value was recognized more quickly. His solid scientific background was a novelty to American psychiatry, which already in the nineties was ready for scientific leadership. Yet, great as Adolf Meyer's influence has been, he has never stated his views completely and most of his ideas have been handed down by his students. Some of these modified them a great deal, others took certain liberties with them, and still others only remembered the peculiar type of verbiage and forgot what was behind it. Freud wrote freely and a great deal. He made many mistakes, acknowledged them, and did not hesitate to modify his views in accordance with the accumulation of new knowledge and experience. Dogmatic as he was, he was certainly less 'dominican' as Zilboorg puts it, than his students.

It is fortunate indeed that after many years two volumes on psychobiology have appeared—one by Muncie, with the approval of Meyer himself, and the o