The Preface and Introduction to this book echo the reviewer's own experience that in some of our psychiatric training centers stereotyped psychodynamic formulations have replaced good descriptive clinical psychiatry. The authors' plans for a new, unbiased empirical approach to depression, which might lead to the discovery and distinction of new clinical sub-categories, certainly sounded very promising. Unfortunately, in the example of such common psychodynamic statements on depression (p. xv), the formulations, as quoted, completely misrepresent our basic psychoanalytic hypotheses regarding melancholic depression.