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This volume is a compact and comprehensive exposition of presentday electroencephalography. Since its inception, electroencephalography and most electroencephalographers have been predominantly interested in organic diseases of the central nervous system, especially epilepsy and brain tumor. In these two areas the EEG has become a valuable diagnostic aid. As one moves toward the disturbances of
emotion, the value of the EEG decreases. This book treats briefly of psychic function and the EEG, the influence of emotion on the EEG, and the EEG and personality. With the exception of the work on percent Alpha and personality, little of value to the psychoanalyst is to be found. Another portion of the book discusses the electroencephalogram and mental illness and devotes little more than one half of one page to the relation of the EEG to anxiety. Observations on the EEG and disorders of feeling are conflicting to a point where for the most part they neutralize one another. For the rest, the book discusses a wide variety of drug effects and other organic pathological conditions and illustrates most of these with well-reproduced sample portions of records.
Over the past ten years the number of significant innovations in electroencephalography have been relatively few. The introduction of frequency analysis, which has not been very widely developed, the stimulation of foci of abnormality in the cortex by the use of intravenous metrazol, photic driving, and the use of pharyngeal and tympanic leads in refining the localization of brain tumors represent those areas warranting attention. Perhaps because of the interests and backgrounds of the majority of people working in the field of electroencephalography, the area of its relationship to emotion has been relatively sparsely studied. Were this area, which lies between psychiatry and neurophysiology, to be cultivated with the same zeal that is devoted to organic conditions, much of value to both specialities might be