The function of handbooks, symposia, and annual reviews is to provide a convenient though brief survey of a field of thought. The cynic might be reminded of a Reader's Digest version of Faust, but there is no question that our mushrooming publications make condensations necessary and useful. Still, volumes such as these lend themselves to critical evaluation not much more easily than an issue of a journal. The first volume contains twenty-seven papers, the second, thirty-five. All deal with aspects of psychiatric therapy. The level of sophistication, the scope, and the background of the contributors vary, and the section headings are hardly more than awkward afterthoughts. Nevertheless, a psychoanalyst primarily preoccupied with problems of his own practice might peruse these volumes profitably to keep abreast with what the rest of the psychiatric world is doing.