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The Thomas Salmon Memorial Lectures of the New York Academy of Medicine are a tribute to the memory of a distinguished and beloved psychiatrist, but their establishment may also be regarded as a symbol of the increased interest in psychiatry awakened by the mental disorders among soldiers during the First World War. Dr. A. A. Brill, who was chosen to deliver these lectures in 1943, began his career as a psychiatrist in the early years of this century and has exerted an important influence on psychiatric thought in this country before, during and since that war. At seventy he is a dominant factor in psychoanalytic and psychiatric endeavors.
To Dr. Brill must be credited the distinction not only of having introduced psychoanalysis into the United States but also the merit of defending it with skill, determination and courage in the earlier days when the mention of it aroused bitterness or ridicule. Dr. Brill has seen the gradual infiltration of psychoanalytic thought into modern American psychiatry and his close association with the movement gives to his book a personal and authoritative aspect.
Two early chapters are almost autobiographical. They present a vivid picture of Brill's experiences as a psychiatrist in a New York State mental hospital before psychoanalytic thinking had affected psychiatry, contrasted with his experiences a few years later at the Burgholzli Hospital in Zurich in 1907. Here Bleuler, Jung and Karl Abraham had begun interpreting and analyzing the utterances and reactions of psychotic patients instead of describing them.
The impression which the analytic approach made upon Brill must have been extremely deep for he marks on page 40: 'Psychoanalysis was, practically speaking, a finished product when I first became acquainted with it. Indeed, I feel even now that anyone who can master the freudian concepts that were known in 1908 will be a good interpretive psychiatrist.' By that time six of Freud's fundamental works had appeared. This opin