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Dr. Diethelm's new edition is undoubtedly an impressive exposition of Treatment in Psychiatry. Slight changes have been made when compared with the first edition. The author emphasizes that the additions in this new book were necessitated by the progress in psychiatric treatment such as the 'well-established somatic procedures, the advances in psychotherapeutic methods in adults and children, and the need for a closer relationship with the other medical disciplines, especially with internal medicine and pediatrics'.
The essential basis for treatment is Adolf Meyer's psychobiologic and psychopathologic formulations. This is best illustrated in the chapter on the study of personality and distributive analysis and synthesis.
The chapter on psychoanalytic procedure, though well written, is too condensed with a tendency toward oversimplification. The castration complex, which is the core of the neurosis and has so many ramifications, is not given much space. The author, in discussing the Oedipus complex, emphasizes only the boy's castration fear and the girl's envy of the male genitalia. There is no mention that in the boy the Oedipus complex in a sense vanishes as a result of the threatened castration. In the normal or ideal cases the Oedipus complex exists no longer even in the unconscious, the superego becoming its heir. In the girl, because of the absence of a