In this edition of their book the authors have kept unchanged the basic organization of material and much of the text of the first edition published ten years earlier. The section on mental illness and old age has been expanded and the diagnostic categories changed to conform with current psychiatric standards.

This book remains one of the best popular surveys of dynamic psychiatry, adequate for intellectual grasp of fundamentals for the novice or dilettante among medical students, clergyment, teachers, nurses, and the laity. It is simple, lucid, informative, and accurate. With a few exceptions, such as statements to the effect that juveniles who are delinquent because of lack of love should be placed in institutions where a select staff able to love them will do so, and that in maturity one should have at least four friends, the authors avoid oversimplification, complication, optimism, or pessimism. There is, however, an over-all promise of ready solutions implicit in the mental hygiene attitude, which does not accord with psychoanalytic experience.