The bulk of this book consists of five papers, read by Harold D. Lasswell, Talcott Parsons, David Riesman, Ralph Linton, and Otto Klineberg, at a symposium on Personality and Political Crisis sponsored by the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1950. Articles by David M. Levy, Renzo Sereno, and Harry Stack Sullivan are added.

This collection can be expected to serve well its purpose of informing the psychiatrist of many problems in personal relations outside the field of psychiatry proper, and of the current attempts to cope with these problems in a systematic and scientific way. The variety of approaches and opinions may seem confusing, but this is not a fault of the book. At the present time, there is no generally accepted methodology for studying 'personality' or 'political crisis'.