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This is the third in a series of four volumes. When the set is completed, the author will have made a monumental contribution to clinical psychiatry, an endeavor to which he has devoted over twenty
years of effort and study. Looking back to the glorious era of French psychiatry, he examines the reasons for its decline which not even Magnan, Régis, or Clérambault were able to redeem. In order to fill this vacuum and to establish a new link between psychiatry and the other medical disciplines—between the Salpétrière and Sainte-Anne, as he puts it—he attempts to create a system of psychiatry, a 'natural history' of mental disease, that would integrate all existing trends. To this endeavor he has brought an enormous erudition not in psychiatry alone, but also in history, philosophy, sociology, and other related fields. To attempt a comprehensive and detailed review is impossible, and only some of the basic ideas can be indicated. Since neither of the preceding parts was reviewed in This QUARTERLY, a brief mention of their contents is necessary.
In the first, Historique—Méthodologie—Psychopathologie Générale, Dr. Ey undertakes a thorough scrutiny of the two main trends in psychiatry, the organomechanistic and the psychogenetic, which he regards as derivatives of the old Cartesian dualism. He thus dwells particularly on the doctrine of G. G. de Clérambault and on Freud's theories, as the outstanding representatives of these two trends. His own thesis, to which he refers as 'organistic dynamism', actually represents a synthesis of both trends and is largely an outgrowth of Hughlings Jackson's concepts. It is best summarized in the author's own words: 'Psychiatry must progress toward a firmly dynamistic view in accordance with the oldest medical doctrines. Forsaking the Cartesian dilemma that constricts the very concept of "mental disease", psychiatry should be neither "mechanistic" nor "psychogenetistic"; for mental disease is not an aggregate of mechanical sym