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Earlier editions or Stoddart's well-known book have been reviewed in these columns. This present third edition marks a distinct advance in the author's mastery of the subject and an interesting development in his change of vision relative to certain newer trends in psychopathology.
Stoddart has broken away from a pure descriptive psychiatry and has come out whole heartedly for a dynamic concept of mental disease and has especially given his support to the value of the principles as applied to modern psychopathology. “Mental disease,” he states in his preface, “can only be understood by studying the psychology of the unconscious of the patient, and the physical manifestations of a functional nervous disorder must be regarded as secondary, not primary, as I taught in my first edition.”
He thus wishes to array himself with those who see in the psychoanalytic methods highly valuable and important new tools for understanding human behavior. His clinical investigations of mental disorder have “convinced him of the truth of Freud's doctrines.”
There are many interesting features of this new edition which appeal to the present reviewer, but space does not permit one to consider them all.
In some respects Stoddart has overstated the situation. Thus in his discussion of the anxiety neurosis he has arranged exophthalmic goiter under this rubric. That many exophthalmic goiters may be so arranged, explained, and cured on this hypothesis and its consequent modes of treatment is beyond cavil, but that all are to be so handled is, we believe, a mistake. Thus there are malignant adenomata of the thyroid which, cause typical and severe exophthalmio goiters. They are definitely nonpsychogenic, and if one should carefully follow the Mayo Clinic Studies of Plummer and his colleagues, the work of Parhon, of Roussy, Laignel-Lavastine, and of many careful endocrinological workers, is becomes apparent that to claim a too rigid psycho-genie etiology for this syndrome does violence to a number