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This new textbook is intended to give the student an understanding of psychiatry by helping him master 'the concepts of dynamic personality formation and structure' and to describe and explain 'the principles of dynamic psychiatry as advanced by Sigmund Freud'. It is further designed to help the reader use the revised
nomenclature accepted by the Council of the American Psychiatric Association in the spring of 1952.
Following a brief introductory chapter, The History of Psychiatry, there are sections on the development and structure of the personality, the development of mental and emotional disorders, and one on history taking, examination, and diagnosis. Child psychiatry occupies about forty pages, followed by chapters of varying lengths dealing with each of the diagnostic headings in the new nomenclature. The book closes with a section on therapy; finally there is an extensive bibliography, followed by an index.
The organization is logical, the writing clear and relatively easy to follow. To the psychoanalyst it will seem highly simplified since it is designed for the use of medical students who have had no previous contact with psychiatry or with psychodynamic principles. The case reports are concise and easily understood. In a formal sense, all the important diagnostic categories are covered and a careful attempt is made to give a dynamic formulation of each.
This is an ambitious volume and in some ways a very successful one, particularly in its organization and clarity of expression. Nevertheless, it has some faults serious enough to reduce its value.
First is the implication that it may be by itself an adequate textbook of psychiatry. The preface does not make clear whether or not the authors intend it to be self-sufficient, but the casual reader may very well be left with that impression. As a textbook of psychiatry, it is open to criticism; although the diagnostic categories are covered, the clinical examples are rather dry and concise, lacking the c