Language and Thought in Schizophrenia: Collected Papers. Edited by J. S. Kasanin, M.D. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1944. 133 pp.

This small book contains a collection of papers on the subject of Schizophrenic Thinking Disorders which were read at the meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1939. The preface by Nolan D. C. Lewis outlines our present knowledge regarding the problem and puts the questions dealt with in the book into a broad historical framework. Dr. Kasanin, who has written one of the papers, also introduces and summarizes each contribution. He has done an extremely skilful job in stressing the most important points and in stating and restating the problems touched upon by the investigators. Though the approaches and even the conclusions of the various authors differ widely in some details, this little book is a unified, representative statement of modern research on language and thought in schizophrenia.

Dr. Sullivan stresses the great intimacy of schizophrenic speech. After the schizophrenic has given up the delusion that speech will help him gain magical satisfaction, he uses it only in an effort to obtain a feeling of security in the presence of strangers. He fails in the process of consensual validation, that is, he does