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This book contains the Proceedings of the Fifty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the American Psychopathological Association. Seventeen papers were presented, including a Presidential Address and a Paul H. Hoch Award Lecture. Although distinguished workers have contributed, the articles in general appear to be remarkably
ordinary. For the psychoanalyst, at least, the almost exclusive emphasis on phenomenology and social psychiatry is boring and frustrating; the frequent reliance on questionnaire and statistical research is distressing. The format too is a bit puzzling. The address of Kenneth Clark, the Paul Hoch Award Lecturer, is not found until page 203. The Presidential Address, an erudite and somewhat polemical discussion of the problems of scientific communication, is also buried in the body of the book. Following most of the articles are discussions which must have frustrated the discussants as much as they do the reader. They are so brief it appears that real discussion was either impossible or very superficial. In general then, the book suffers from the problems of most published proceedings of meetings. Too often the articles are written for oral presentation to live audiences and not as publishable material; and the material itself is frequently not original, but rather summaries of, or addenda to, previously presented work.
Several of the articles, however, do present new thinking, the most notable being John Money's Hormonal and Genetic Extremes at Puberty and Kenneth Keniston's Postadolescence (Youth) and Historical Change. The first is an interesting contribution to the problems of interplay between constitutional (genetic) make-up and environmental opportunity and expectation. Money himself acknowledges that psychological exploration in depth of the personality structure and the psychopathology of the reported cases would be highly desirable. Lacking this, he is able to make only phenomenological distinctions.
Keniston's hypothesis is probably alr