You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychopathology has now developed to the gratifying point where a book on psychiatry which ignores deterministic avenues of approach is well on the way to a highly deserved doom ere it is hatched. Hence, due chiefly to an avoidance of this blunder, Dr. Hamilton has produced a work that may possibly survive a critical avalanche or two, but we should be reluctant to assume responsibility for its ultimate fate.
The book is comprised of two parts. Part one is the alleged study of two hundred neurotic individuals who resided in the lower Mississippi Valley, the author's old home. The symptoms presented by the patient, a physical characteristic or two, an abstract of the author's “purely objective” perusals, interpretations of symptoms and an occasional vague generalization, are included in practically every case, which averages about a half a page in length. “The first ten cases,” we are told “will introduce the reader to biologic principles which have been derived from my experimental and field studies of sexual behavior in monkeys, in part from field studies of the sexual behavior of adolescent boys …” Yet we search in vain for primates, and finally succeed in locating one adolescent boy among the ten cases which served the doctor so well in illustrating his “biologic principles” concerning human beings. The author apparently had some especial reason for using these cases for illustrative purposes that he did not care particularly to divulge, as another 145 of the 200 cases did not differ essentially in general texture from the first ten. All, in fact, in the author's special lingo, showed “persistent, nonadjustive, affective reactions directly or indirectly as the result of baffled major or minor cravings.”
The symptomatology of these cases is rather uniform. Fatigue, general unrest, lassitude, apprehension, vague somatic complaints and mild depressions and agitations constitute the rule. Sporadic organic and frankly