Psychosomatic Research. A Collection of Papers: By J. J. Groen, et al. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1964. 318 pp.

J. J. Groen is a distinguished Dutch internist, now holder of the chair of medicine of the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical School in Jerusalem, where he enjoys the distinction of being the only head of a university department of medicine in the world whose major area of interest and study has been in psychosomatic medicine. To Alan Gregg, late Vice President of the Rockefeller Foundation, he owes the stimulation of his interest in psychosomatics and his first encounter with the works of Alexander, Dunbar, and other pioneers of the 1930's. But it was not until 1940, when the Nazi invasion of Holland forced him out of university work into a small private practice, that he began to study psychosomatic relationships among his patients. Upon his return to his hospital post he resolved upon a more systematic research, for which purpose he enlisted the interest of Professor van der Horst (now Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Amsterdam). Through this collaboration there developed a team ultimately including a psychoanalyst as well as a physiologist, psychologists, and other internists and psychiatrists. The present volume brings together the major papers of this group published between 1951 and 1963. They were all published originally in English, most of them in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research.

For anyone interested in psychosomatic problems this is an important work, irrespective of what differences one may have with some of the theoretical formulations offered by Groen and his associates. It includes both clinical observations and experimental studies and it has the merit that it provides data on patients as