Emotional Problems of Living—Avoiding the Neurotic Pattern: By O. Spurgeon English, M.D. and Gerald H. J. Pearson, M.D. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc. 1945. 438 pp.

To those who look with a jaded eye upon the flood of print designed to popularize psychiatry currently roaring from the presses, this fine book will come as a welcome relief. Not directly addressed to psychiatrists, but intended for medical students, social workers and allied professional groups, it can be read with great profit not only by physicians generally but by those specialists in psychiatry whose training in psychodynamics has not been particularly intensive. The vast clinical experience of the writers satisfies the most exacting demands, and manifests itself on every page in a wealth of cogent illustrations which makes the book extraordinarily readable.

The enormously leavening influence of psychoanalysis, applied with an exactness and consistency which leave nothing to be desired, makes every case history come to life, and should give sober thought to those who are too easily satisfied with the various mechanistic, habit training and so-called common sense approaches to problems of human behavior. As reflected in too many textbooks and in too many medical curricula, these psychiatric viewpoints, so comforting to the ego defenses, exert an influence upon the education of our medical youth which takes many of them years of frustration to overcome. This book is so sober and yet so stimulating, so free of polemic and expletive, that it stands out as a modest monument to the fact that psychoanalysis has come of age.

Using the libido theory as their nodal point, the authors follow the vicissitudes of the instincts through infancy to maturity in painstaking detail. Every aspect of feeding, weaning, toilet training, psychosexual development and the rest is covered with satisfying thoroughness. If at first there appears to be no systematic