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By Jan Ehrenwald. New York: Grune and Stratton, Inc., 1966. 212 pp.
This thoughtful volume by a psychiatrist, friendly to psychoanalytic thinking, consists of an attempt to separate aspects of myth and scientific rationale in order to arrive at a more fully integrated approach. Behind the historic tracing of mental healing, originally based entirely on magic and, later, on mythical or semirational deliberations, one senses the author's attempt to integrate the many psychotherapeutic influences impinging in today's world on every practitioner and to come to a point of view beyond the doctrines of different schools. He deals with effective myths of the past, with Mesmer, parapsychology, existentialism, and the different schools that stress differing aspects of psychoanalytic thinking. He offers a variety of case illustrations, trying to show behind different schools of psychotherapy the common denominator of the myth, but questions whether this ingredient which he sees in all schools of psychotherapy can be considered an effective therapeutic agent.
It is true as Freud suggests that at the base of each science, as well as in analysis, is a 'kind of mythology'; but I think that the notion