Massive Psychic Trauma: Edited by Henry Krystal. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1968. 369 pp.

The Wayne State University Workshop Proceedings have been well edited so that a coherent and highly readable book on psychic trauma emerges. The thirty-five participants offer a genuine scientific contribution resulting from their examinations of the survivors of Nazi German concentration camps, the survivors of Hiroshima, and/or the data of their colleagues. While the project began with examinations for disability compensation of the victims, the demands upon the mature and experienced examiners for a deeper understanding of the plight of the survivor soon made itself felt. To comprehend and to permit the revelation of pertinent data required that each examiner adopt a position in which he could empathize, without counteridentification; objectify, without dehumanizing a traumatized person; be (sympathetically) evaluative, without revenge motivation; and, finally, arrive at a demonstrable conclusion and judgment of the extent of disability and the causes thereof specifically related to the horrifying brutality to which the Survivor Syndrome sufferer has been subjected. The ramifications of 'survivor guilt' and the resistance to therapeutic intent complicated the situation further.

As the book has only a seven-page historical introduction to the fifteen hundred years of preceding anti-Semitism, the reader is catapulted into participation in the proceedings. He misses the strange mythology of a part of the Western world where ancient accusations of deicide leveled against the Jews have undergone bewildering transformation into a rationalized persecutory system that requires that they be punished by genocide. The sole capital crime which each victim has committed is that of having been born of Jewish parents, and his acculturation and its effects are only touched upon in case histories occasionally. The examiners, however, need no orientation. It is perhaps an oversight not to have prepared many readers who are unfamiliar with the progressive isolation and dehum