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This volume is an outgrowth of papers presented at the meeting of the American Psychopathological Association in 1945 and contains contributions from nineteen writers, each exceptionally well qualified to discuss the topic assigned to him. The subtitles of the book indicate its scope: (1) Problems in the modern psychiatric hospital; (2) Physiochemical techniques in psychiatry; (3) Psychotherapeutic techniques in psychiatry; (4) Psychiatric guidance and rehabilitation techniques. Necessarily there is some overlapping in this attempt to designate certain techniques as specific for special situations.
In the introductory paper, the Presidential Address, Dr. Glueck reviews many questions of sociological importance in which psychiatric thinking might be of advantage. He makes a plea for an attempt to transmute our psychiatric knowledge and concepts so that they may be understood by the man in the street. The methods by which this might be accomplished are not presented. The difficulties of this task are apparent for, even in cases of long continued individual therapy, knowledge of the motives which may be the cause of the patient's asocial behavior and which he earnestly hopes to change does not always prove effective.
The part of the book devoted to the physiochemical techniques covers the field of convulsive therapies and pharmacological therapies thoroughly and is up-to-date. In the large number of articles dealing with psychotherapy the influence of psychoanalytic thinking is almost universally noted although reference to Freud's original contributions are few and far between. For instance, in one of the longest articles in the book, The Field and Objectives of Group Therapy, Freud's fundamental article on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego is not mentioned. It is in Freud's paper that the dynamics of the unconscious identification of the individuals in the group with each other were first discussed.
Similarly in the article on psychiatric rehabilitat