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'Psychoanalytically oriented clinicians', the authors say, 'tend to focus predominantly on the patient's "disorder" and to regard it largely as a derivative of unconscious processes. Progress in the development of ego psychology and of dynamic social psychology will be greatly facilitated, we believe, by more focal consideration of the individual's engagement with his sociocultural environment. We
must move, so to say, from the "psychopathology of everyday life" to the psychodynamics of social adaptation in the broadest sense. To do so will require a more complex and informed view of the ego and of social reality.' The 'egos' which the authors undertook to study belonged to a group of patients admitted for inpatient psychiatric care, and the 'social reality' which they studied was that provided by the ward of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. After a period of preliminary study, they collected data from their patients by means of a questionnaire and subjected their data to an apparently competent mathematical analysis. The study should be interesting, for both its theory and its method, to any analyst who concerns himself with treatment of the hospitalized patient.
It is regrettable that the entire statistical study is based on only fifty male patients and fifty female patients. Furthermore, although the book was published in 1964, the data were collected in 1957. As the authors acknowledge, many of their basic premises about hospital treatment of the mentally ill are no longer valid because of great advances which have taken place in that interval of time.
In spite of the promise of an integrated psychoanalytic and sociologic approach, one seeks in vain for the psychoanalytic frame of reference. The authors acknowledge that they have no data to corroborate some of their psychoanalytic inferences. And they have neglected to include an index, a matter of no small importance in a scientific report over two hundred fifty pages long.
In spite of these lim