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This is another book dealing with a delinquent, in this instance one who is in a penitentiary—for what and for how long it is not apparent. The author states that the patient's somatic complaints cleared up during forty-six hours of treatment, treatment which he calls hypnoanalysis and describes as a combination of hypnosis and psychoanalysis. During the first thirty-eight sessions the patient is supposed to have associated freely. Only in the last eight hours is hypnosis employed—to bring certain memories and other material to consciousness. To the author's satisfaction, the patient recovers a memory which he says belongs to a period when the patient was between six and nine months of age.
Lindner is a psychologist. In a discussion of psychopathy he says many questionable things and makes many invalid generalizations. In discussing psychoanalysis, particularly in relation to criminality, he attributes concepts to psychoanalysis which are not a part of clinical psychoanalytic thinking. There is a vast psychoanalytic literature on delinquency to which but little reference is made.
The story presented in this book is duplicated in many of the excellent reports of social workers in the child guidance field. It represents a valiant effort but does not present any unique result. The success of Lindner's treatment notwithstanding, the concepts and formulation of the method do not represent the new development or departure claimed by him. Then, too, one must remember that in psychotherapy with inmates of a penal institution the positive transference or compliant attitude, when at all present, is usually very strong, while the negative aspects of the transference are much less likely to appear because of the inhibiting factors inherent in the incarceration. It might further be remarked that the use of hypnosis under such conditions renders the already more or less compliant patient even more suggestible, and sometimes what one unconsciously wishes to obtain from hi