Man in Estrangement: A Comparison of the Thought of Paul Tillich and Erich Fromm: By Guyton B. Hammond. Nashville, Tenn: Vanderbilt University Press, 1965. 194 pp.

With the decline and near demise of the title alienist as a synonym for a psychiatrist, the term alienation has come to have more and more of a general meaning not necessarily reserved for the insane. The newer sets of definitions have included aspects of internal and external separation, or isolation of men from one another, from the natural world around them, from inner thought and feelings that have been held in discontinuity, and from unresolved contradiction or conflict. Moreover the term has also begun to serve as a bridge concept between psychiatry, philosophy, and religion. This latter usage seems to have stemmed from phenomenological and existential trends in philosophical anthropology, philosophy of religion, and psychotherapy.

Historically the vicissitudes and fate of the alienated have seemed to be dictated largely by a social definition. In Huxley's The Devils of Loudun and in Foucauld's Histoire de la Folie, among numerous other sources, one may trace the changing popular and official attitudes toward madness. But Tillich, Camus, Fromm, and Heidigger seem less interested in the certifiably insane than in man's estrangement from himself, his neighbor, and the complex one might call nature—the universe—God.

In Hammond's ambitious (and usually successful) volume, he traces and clarifies the philosophical problem of varieties of estrangement and of the inevitable consequent dilemmas in their clarification and differentiation. He shows how Fromm was influenced in his anthropology by both Marx and Freud. He poses the axiological question as to whether healthy-mindedness is a sufficient or even necessary prerequisite for virtue. In so doing, the process of therapy is scrutinized for the presence of latent or overt ethical (if not spiritual) influence and effect (whether or not intended or recognized either by patient or therapist). Moving on to an overview of Tillich's ontology, anthropology, and soteriology, the author points out similarities, pseudo-