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This monograph is in the purest phenomenological and descriptive tradition of classical psychiatry. This is particularly notable in view of the fact that the author is a psychoanalyst who is associated with the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis. Too frequently those who work in the psychiatric outpatient clinic are able to make refined psychodynamic reconstructions but unfortunately fail to recognize a latent schizophrenia or depression. Clinical psychoanalysis can ill afford to divorce itself from its parent discipline, particularly with respect to the problems of diagnosis and prognosis. It is on these problems that the author has thrown some light.
The approach is typological and takes its departure from Bleuler and Kretchmer. 'Variations in health and ill-health are thought of wholly as matters of degree. The qualitative distinction which is thought to be vital is that between the affective and schizophrenic psychoses. This does not mean that gradations between the two types are impossible, but that two factors at least (determined by heredity) are involved, the majority of people having either one or the other and only a few having both.' Within these types (the author speculates that there is 'possibly' a third, the epileptic) there occurs a series of clinical groups which are not mutually exclusive but which, by degrees, pass from 'certain healthy personality types' through 'certain abnormal personality types' and 'certain psychoneuroses' to the respective psychoses.
This concept differs from that of the past in that each of these groups were considered essentially distinct, showing a greater unity within themselves than with any of the others. Psychoanalysis has