Psychology's Ghosts—The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back, by Jerome Kagan,  Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2012,  340 pp., $23.52

Jerome Kagan has written a book that is best described as provocative and thought provoking, as he challenges many psychological/psychiatric concepts that are presently accepted and utilized in therapy and theoretical formulations. His belief is that problems in the mental health profession have been ignored by investigators and clinicians. His comments are more relevant with regard to general psychiatry and psychology than psychoanalysis which, in my opinion, actually addresses many of his concerns and criticisms and has done so since the time of Freud. The author cites four major problems: The first being the indifference to the setting in which observations are gathered, including the age, class, and cultural background of individuals studied, and especially to the assumption that similar verbal reports of well-being reflect similar psychological states. He does not discuss the work that is done in psychoanalysis to uncover mistaken assumptions or corrective actions. The second issue he discusses is the habit of basing inferences on single measures rather than patterns of measures. He notes that every action, reply, and biological response can result from more than one set of conditions. The third issue he presents is the defining of mental illness by symptoms independent of their origin and the treatment of disorders with drugs and forms of psychotherapy that are nonspecific to the diagnosed illness. He writes that most experts suppress the effects of the person's social class and culture assuming, for example, that a report of depression by an Ojibwa in Manitoba had the same origins as a similar report by a lawyer in Los Angeles. The author notes that language provides limited information on most mental states because all people have a restricted vocabulary and are tempted to conceal traits they regard as undesirable and have no access to what their brain or body is doing when they describe feelings or motivations. He writes; ‘What is missing from much research