From Chestnut Lodge, a private psychiatric hospital of high reputation, which has done pioneering work in the psychoanalytic therapy of psychotics, comes this comprehensive volume, the result of years of long research and collaboration. The authors availed themselves of the unique opportunity offered by the setting of Chestnut Lodge to observe and study for years schizophrenics engaged in therapy as well as in interaction with the hospital environment. Untrammeled by the restrictions imposed by the treatment of patients in private practice or the economic exigencies limiting the stay of patients in most community or even teaching hospitals, the Chestnut Lodge team could study patients for periods of time, which from the vantage point of an average observer seem almost unlimited.

In the conduct and analysis of their studies the authors chose as the focus of their orientation what they call the need-fear dilemma. They believe that at least in one group of schizophrenics the inborn psychic apparatus is normal, while in another