This textbook on psychiatry purports to meet the need of the general practitioner, particularly in a small community, who is obliged to deal with mental disturbances. It is an incredibly naïve presentation of the subject and it fails completely in its aim. An inept attempt is made to present a psychopathology on the crudest neurological basis. An example: in paranoia 'the abnormal stimulation of a given ideational center will cause "reasoning from false premises", and such reasoning will seem sound to the patient if the lines for the discharge of the misdirected neural energy are well formed … Sooner or later, the vicarious channeling in his brain becomes so well organized that he believes that his absurd ideas are true …'

The works of the medical psychologists of the last century were all in vain as far as Dr. Brawner is concerned. Therefore, the medical practitioner whom he sets out to instruct will be left in the dark about them, and, for that matter, about the application of neurophysiology to psychiatric problems as well.