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Dr. William A. White, to whom this volume is dedicated, in his recent “Foundations of Psychiatry,”1 says that “psychiatry bids fair to become the great unifying medical specialty which emphasizes the necessity for a consideration of the organism as a whole in the most comprehensive meaning of such a concept, recognizing and giving proper weight to its heritage from the past on the one hand and appreciating, on the other hand, the nature of its strivings to become integrated with its fellows in the super-organism, society.”
The present volume is a masterly contribution setting forth the detailed mechanisms of man's strivings for the satisfaction of cravings essential to life and happiness and the numerous types of disturbance that result from interference with the carrying out of these life reactions. Kempf has done this in a manner which is broad and free and powerful. The unity of the organism in its strivings towards definite affective goals, is a foundation stone of his presentation, the “keystone of which, one might say, is to gain power and prestige with the herd. Hence moral values, in the large, are recognized as factors in the production of disease.
Disease in this book is seen as something essentially dynamic, processes are primary, names are but secondary. The “why” is much more important than the “what”—this latter, like fashions in clothes, is but a matter of a day or decade. Who hut the few Garrisons know even the labels of yesterday?
Born into a world of reality the infant child must learn to master it or be mastered by it. Its early years of associative reaction with this environment are prominently stressed by Kempf. Here the principle of the “conditioned reflex” looms large as that by which the entire group of life's reactions will very early—even at times, it may be, intra-uterine—become fixed and inevitable as goals of craving satisfaction, to the salvation or damnation of the human being.
Nowhere in contemporaneous literature can be found so valuable