The Image of the Heart and the Principle of Synergy in the Human Mind: By Daniel E. Schneider, M.D. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1956. 267 pp.

Some useful clinical ideas can be extracted from this otherwise confusing book. These may be summarized as follows: because one can hear it beat and feel it pulse, the heart achieves psychic representation. Consequently, it may become a symbol for the genitals, a child, or the person's own body; it may also become the subject of unconscious fantasies of being attacked or dismembered. Such fantasies probably originate in the period of early object relations when the infant animistically endows its mother with its own destructive rage. The fear engendered by these fantasies stimulates the autonomic nervous system, causing the heart to pound and its rate to increase, and these sensations are then misinterpreted as the expected attack on it. A reciprocal relationship is thus established: heart fantasies affect heart action, and heart action re-enforces heart fantasies. A person with such fear unconsciously wishes for a unity with the good mother in which her heart works for him while his rests. But this longing is masked by driven activity and an attempt to control people, money, emotion, and time. The author believes that the terror associated with fantasies of attack on the heart has an important role in paroxysmal tachycardia and premature coronary occlusion.

The author, however, is not content with making a clinical contribution. He states that he has opened the way to a 'new science' called 'synergic psychoneurology' which he claims is based on 'sonic-cybernetic concepts' of the nervous system. Nowhere are these terms explained in an understandable way. His description of the super-ego as a 'cybernetic steersman-repressor', his statement that anxiety 'is dyssynergy between the image of the heart and the rest of the ego', and his claim that repression is related to a hypothetical 'sonic-ultrasonic barrier' in the nervous system, all strike this reviewer as abstruse and fancifully theoretical.

Almost every other page prickles with phrases italicized for em