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For those of us who share Santayana's conviction that we are doomed
to repeat the history we do not remember, this complex and wide-ranging work offers rich vistas of the past and the hope of enlarged perspectives on perennial problems in our field.
Bennett Simon's scholarship and insights in his "two passions—the Greek classics and—psychiatry and psychoanalysis," amply evident over some three hundred pages of heavily annotated text, make him both fine guide and good companion in this time-shuttle between the then and now of some twenty-five hundred years of human beings' efforts to know themselves in their world.
His intent is to throw light from the past on our current muddle over what is mental illness, what is treatment, what is a psychiatrist. His mode is to inform us with rich samplings of ancient and classical Greek thought and tradition regarding mind and character, madness and illness, healing and being. His strategy is to move back and forth between the current scene and the old, mirroring one with the other in amplification of both.
Thus, he schematizes the present-day babel of tongues in human psychology as a polarization between the intrapsychic (psychoanalytic) model and the social-psychiatric, with another polarity between these two and the medical model. For ancient Greece, his sortings are into yet another three modes: the poetic (chiefly Homeric), the philosophical (mainly Platonic), and the medical (the Hippocratic corpus). Here, too, he identifies significant tensions and differences in Greek thought about the value and nature of the poet, the philosopher, and the physician; the divergences and polarities of their viewpoints on the orderings of the mind; and the particular role each claimed in the healing of those disorders each sought to name.
His style is polished and coherent, but while he is scrupulous in annotating his sources and the contributions of others, his assertive mode and notational style are such that the reader must often chec