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Four years ago, when the war was very real, The Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Diseases held a symposium on Military Neuropsychiatry. This book, their twenty-fifth publication, reports the best of the papers delivered at this meeting with the accompanying discussions. There are forty-seven contributors. The content of these papers, as might be expected when an endeavor to satisfy all tastes is attempted, varies from the boring to the brilliant for the individual reader.
The papers on the Organization and Functioning of Psychiatric Programs are among the boring ones, especially when there is no war on. However, the one on the Mental Hygiene Unit by Louis L. Robbins is well done and interesting, even in retrospect. His stressing of the fact that the mechanisms of defense of the ego are so much tied up with the proper occupational classification of the recruits struck a sympathetic chord in the reviewer who well remembers the tremendous difficulties encountered by him while overseas when he attempted to pull round pegs out of square holes.
The most original and spectacular contribution to the development of psychotherapy during World War II was that of Grinker and Spiegel. Not only were drugs, mainly sodium pentothal, used for abreaction and reintegration, but the cases were classified and treated from a dynamic and analytic point of view. Grinker's paper, A Dynamic Study of War Neuroses in Flyers Returned to the United States, was up to his usual standard of interest and is of particular importance now that we are seeing his predictions