Henderson and Gillespie's Textbook of Psychiatry. Ninth Edition: Revised by Sir David Henderson and Ivor R. C. Batchelor. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. 578 pp.

The ninth edition of Henderson and Gillespie is worthy of its predecessors; it is one of the best introductions to psychiatry. The historic, social, legal, genetic, neurologic, biochemical, and statistical aspects of psychiatry are ably presented. The classification and diagnosis of psychiatric disorders are sound and instructive. While drugs and other physical modalities of treatment are clearly and succinctly described, the authors warn against reliance on such measures to the neglect of psychotherapy, hospital and community milieu therapy, vocational rehabilitation, and work with the patient's family, all so essential to his treatment.

In spite of their coolness to psychoanalysis, the authors' psychotherapeutic approach compounds a good deal of valid psychoanalytic theory into their fundamentally Meyerian psychobiologic orientation. One can think of far less felicitous eclecticism. Freud, Abraham, Jones, Ferenczi, and Fenichel are quoted or referred to. The concept of unconscious psychic conflict, among other psychoanalytic formulations, is held worthy of incorporation into the fundamentals of psychiatry, but the theory of infantile sexuality still evokes conspicuous gagging.

More serious is the fact that the authors regard as safe the use of the 'main psychoanalytic techniques' (free association, dream interpretation, and analysis of the transference) by psychotherapists untrained in psychoanalysis. Whereas 'classical psychoanalysis as a treatment method has limited applicability' and 'wrongly used psychoanalysis can be dangerous', neither the dangers nor the wrong use is elaborated. One is left with the impression that psychoanalysis by a psychoanalyst is risky business, but not psychotherapy by someone using the main techniques. It may be no accident that countertransference is not mentioned. The matter is worth clarifying