Anxiety. (The Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the American Psychopathological Association, Held in New York City, June 1949.): Edited by Paul H. Hoch, M.D. and Joseph Zubin, Ph.D. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1950. 254 pp.

This symposium, a valuable cross-disciplinary survey of recent investigations into the origins and manifestations of anxiety, presents contributions from the viewpoints of sociology, psychology, animal experimentation, biology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

The book starts with papers by Rollo May, Paul Tillich, and O. Hobart Mowrer who develops his well-known view that anxiety represents not repressed id, but repressed superego.

Eugenia Hanfmann gives a very informative review of psychological methods and studies, indicating two typical patterns of the individual's functioning under anxiety: a disorganized one, occurring in acute intense anxiety; and a rigid and inhibited one, characteristic of covert chronic anxiety. William N. Schoenfeld presents a critical survey of recent findings in animal experimentation, from which he derives an explanation of 'avoidance behavior' in terms of 'escape processes'.

On the basis of experimental investigations of mammalian behavior, Howard S. Liddell explains animal neurosis as being due to the disorganizing effect of protracted vigilance; anxiety in human beings, as resulting from long-continued demands upon this expectancy machinery. It would seem more plausible to see in vigilance the result rather than the preliminary cause of anxiety.

Heinrich Waelsch and E. Gellhorn add valuable biological data. The latter discusses Cannon's concept of hypothalamic 'downward' and 'upward' discharges which account, respectively, for the bodily expression and the 'feeling tone' of emotion.

Lauretta Bender presents a detailed and instructive study of anxiety in disturbed children, based upon fifteen years of experience with seven thousand to eight thousand cases. Two groups are distinguished: 1, psychopathic behavior, least responsive to treatment, which results mainly from disturbances in the relationship to a mothering figure (there is no capacity for anxiety which is replaced by immediate discharges, and there are no neurotic mechanisms o