Hypnotherapy—A Survey of the Literature: By Margaret Brenman, Ph.D. and Merton M. Gill, M.D. New York: International Universities Press, 1947. 276 pp.

Dr. Brenman and Dr. Gill deserve congratulations for their lucid account and view of the current status of hypnotherapy. The book is divided into five chapters which deal with historical developments, techniques, hypnotizability, therapeutic applications

and theories of hypnosis. Four case studies are reported in which Dr. Robert P. Knight and Dr. Karl A. Menninger collaborated. Finally, Dr. Brenman contributes an experimental study on the use of hypnotic techniques in a study of tension systems.

This reviewer has been long familiar with the careful, methodical studies on this subject by Brenman and Gill. They have viewed the phenomena of the processes of hypnosis, the state of hypnosis and the therapeutic implications from the point of view of psychoanalysis and Lewinian field theories. The contributions of Gestalt psychology are also applied to their observations.

This report is best regarded as a survey both of a field and of work in progress. For that reason no critical standard is pertinent with respect to the data themselves. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, however, several important problems are brought into the foreground. It is as easy to view the phenomena of hypnotism, and the psychological data derived by this technique by means of psychoanalysis, as any phenomenon in human psychology. Hypnotherapy, however, has been offered as a form of brief psychotherapy which like other brief methods, such as narcotherapy, are intended in some way by certain practitioners to supplant psychoanalysis. The authors have thoughtfully and critically distinguished between so-called brief psychoanalytically oriented therapy and psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method.

In general, most forms of brief psychotherapy have in common the intense application of psychoanalytic psychology to the treatment of mental diseases. The other aspects of psychoanalysis, e.g., that it is an investigative technique, are generally excluded. It remains to be seen whether brief