Theories of Schizophrenia: Edited by Arnold H. Buss and Edith H. Buss. New York: Atherton Press, 1969. 175 pp.

There may be some justification for making a book out of seven already published articles. If so, these papers should be of superior quality and welded together by inspired editorial comment. This book, however, consists of flimsy speculations on the nature of schizophrenia, pedantically expressed, and given coherence by the editorial discovery that man is a biological, psychological, and social creature.

Paul Meehl's genetic-neural-psychological musings on a possible inherited defect which may predispose to schizophrenia are at least attractively daring and knowledgeable. The same cannot be said for those papers dealing with cognitive theory based on attentional deficit, learning theory based on anxiety as an interfering drive, communication theory based on Bateson's double bind hypothesis, and social isolation hypotheses based on community rejection. The problem of psychological regression is taken up in two papers, one a naïve regurgitation of some of Harry Stack Sullivan's thinking, a psychiatrist noteworthy for clinical skill but theoretically inept, and the other a somewhat more sophisticated development of the ideas of Heinz Werner. Freud, of course, is considered outmoded.

To top off this dismal mélange we have the editors' clear pronouncement that schizophrenia is merely the end point of three different dimensions of psychosis. There is a 'nuclear, process, nonparanoid, true schizophrenia' and, radiating from this core will be found psychotic depressions, atypical psychoses, and paranoid schizophrenia. Such nosological nonsense is in keeping with the general theoretical level of this book.