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World War I was followed by profound and significant developments in ego psychology. These have had a salutary and sobering effect upon the application of psychiatry, as well as psychoanalysis itself, to the social sciences, an effect which was given a spirited impetus by the second World War. It is an interesting speculation that these attempts to synthesize our knowledge of human behavior might not have been set into motion without a cataclysmic threat to the existence of the race; in any event, whatever the limitations of psychiatry, it has become a matter of dreadful urgency that it organize its resources in the war against war. Ivory towers are not immune to atomic bombs.
Dr. Levy's book, set solidly in a matrix of clinical psychiatry based on modern psychodynamics, ranges the field from child guidance to political psychiatry. Such chapter headings as Comparative Psychiatry, Delinquency, Criminology, Industrial Psychiatry, Military Psychiatry, etc., illustrate the ambitiousness and versatility of his interests. Especially refreshing is his lively application of clinical data, which makes the first and last chapters delightful and impressive reading. The former, based on his work at the Chicago Institute for Juvenile Research twenty-eight years ago, contains data from a clinical conference illustrating with fine precision and clarity the varying viewpoints of a psychologist, a social worker and psychiatrists of different schools on the case of a thirteen-year-old boy. We are not surprised to find that the psychoanalytic view prevailed in the end; what is exciting is the knowledge that those were pioneer days, and that such triumphs were an augury of days to come, when the enormously fructifying influence of psychoanalysis was to lead it to a dominant rôle in the field of child guidance.
The final chapter of the book, A Sample Case Study in Political Psychiatry, describes in detail the examination of an applicant for a license as publisher in postwar Germany