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This little book brilliantly condenses and synthesizes a great deal of the recent data from the sleep laboratories of the United States and abroad. An avalanche of papers and books from these laboratories has filled the literature with contradictory opinions in almost every area. A multidisciplinary babel has arisen, with voices coming from physiology, neurophysiology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, neurochemistry, etc. If ever a field cried out for synthesis, it is this one. Hartmann's book is a highly suggestive, provocative, and in many ways successful attempt to bring some order out of chaos. His competence in a number of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, enables him to make significant correlations between neurophysiological, biochemical, and psychological events.
This work should be of interest to psychoanalysts because it concerns itself largely with the functions of so-called rapid eye movement sleep—variously called 'D', desynchronized, or REM sleep—which is associated with dreaming, as well as with the functions of synchronized or 'S' sleep, also referred to as orthodox or NREM sleep.
Hartmann starts out with the assumption that sleep which is required by all humans and mammals has a basic restitutive or restorative function, as common sense seems to dictate. The evidence indicates that S sleep, especially deep Stage 4, has a physiological restorative function. It is increased following exercise, fatigue, sleep deprivation, prolonged bed rest which produces tissue damage, and by hyperthyroidism. In all these conditions catabolism is increased and