Unconsciousness: By James Grier Miller. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1942. 329 pp.

The author begins his treatise on unconsciousness with a regretful comment deploring the separation of clinic and laboratory in the field of psychology. The reasons are historic as well as psychological. In the middle of the last century, psychologists, interested primarily in the function of the so-called normal mind, succeeded in establishing independent chairs of psychology on the continent and subsequently in America. This was followed by complete separation of the laboratory and the clinic. Psychology became a fairly sterile branch of physiology and lost sight of its primary objective, that is, the study of the human psyche. This of necessity was taken over by psychiatry which, since it is a clinical science, naturally suffered as would any clinical science were it divorced from an objective and solid scientific background in its thinking and deductions. Then again, psychology is interested in the mind in general, whereas the clinician is primarily interested in the individual.

The academic psychologists are essentially sceptics. The clinicians on the other hand are loose thinkers. The psychologists felt that they were on the right track because they were able to introduce the experimental method into the study of the mind but they