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Two generations of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have been stimulated in their interest to alleviate mental illness by the founder of psychoanalysis in America. First to bring Freud's monumental discoveries to this country, and, by his translations of Freud's major works, to the English-speaking world, Brill's place in the history of twentieth century psychiatry has been fully acknowledged here and abroad. A hint as to his zeal in publishing several volumes on psychoanalysis, translating Freud, Bleuler's Textbook of Psychiatry, Jung's Psychology of Dementia Præcox, and his numerous valuable contributions of papers in the field of the mental sciences is perhaps found in Dr. Brill's words of dedication of these Lectures: 'To the State Hospital Physicians who bear the brunt of curing and alleviating mental ailments; in whose ranks I served and to whom these lectures were first addressed'. Today, at the age of seventy-two, Brill is still serving in the 'ranks'. The reviewer who counts it a privilege to be one of Brill's many students, who listened to his Lectures at various times, feels certain that the greater audience of students and practitioners of psychoanalysis and psychiatry will learn much of permanent value from these Lecutures in book form.
It is Dr. Brill's special talent to convey to the reader the distilled essence of an impressive accumulation of sound observations in the science of the mind. There is abundant evidence of profound scholarship, but no impression of pedantry. Alive and brilliantly presented clinical material is interlaced with a critical digestion from the heterogeneous storehouse of psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature. Psychoanalytic psychiatry has grown along with Dr. Brill and he writes intimately of this growth from its early beginnings in Burghölzli to the recent pharmaco-shock-narco-therapies. Students should want to attain the wide base of learning covered in the numerous references. The arrangement of a table of con