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The author's professed purpose in this book was to get '… into print certain fundamentals of modern dynamic psychiatry now being taught by his colleagues and himself only through lecture and precept'. It is apparently addressed to undergraduate physicians, nurses, psychologists and social workers, and is intended to neutralize their popular misconceptions and possible morbid preoccupations associated with a narrow approach to psychiatry. To this end there are discussions of somatic, reflexologic (Pavlov, not Bechterew), behavioristic (Waston), psychobiologic (Meyer), semantic (Korzybski), psychoanalytic (Freud), and other points of view. These various systems of investigating, interpreting and applying psychologic phemonena are compared with each other and especially with the author's own base-line of reference to which he applies the term, Biodynamics.
The term biodynamic was 'adopted as the most meaningful designation for a biologically oriented and dynamic formulation of behavior'. It represents in a sense a multidimensional point of view in which established biologic principles (governing evolution, structure and physiology), behavior (phenomenologic) and environmental factors are simultaneously expressed. The author emphasizes that this conception of a dynamically interacting and interdependent complex of variables is a thesis in progress and will be subject to modifications as knowledge in psychology and associated disciplines will increase.
The book is truly an extraordinarily amibitious enterprise. It attempts to condense both outmoded and current psychologic systems as well as Masserman's own formulations, experimental work and general publications in the fields of neurophysiology, clinical psychiatry, psychoanalysis and propaganda analysis.
Taken at its face value, as a source book or a kind of textbook