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This book aims to provide a practical psychiatry, 'usable at the bedside', for medical students and social workers. It will appeal to readers who are ignorant of psychiatry outside of the State Hospital, chiefly because of its simple language and colorful case histories which the author has taken from his private and Naval practice as well as from the newspaper columns.
The chapters on mental deficiency, constitutional psychopathy, and chronic alcoholism, presented with due emphasis on the social implications, reflect a rich experience with these problems.
The author's assumption of 'four basic personality traits (intelligence, conscience, emotional reactions, and psychosexual development) and two secondary personality factors (sociability and special modes of adjustment)' serves as a frame for the discussion of psychiatric abnormalities. 'These traits are inherited, constitutional, and immutable, and are not subject to change by environment, education or training' (p. 3). Thus, in 1945, we are confronted with a psychiatry which reaffirms inherited constitution as the primary and predominant genetic factor in personality disorder. In accordance with this point of view, there are many violent and