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Dr. Meyerson has produced a book the title and size of which remind one of Bernard Hart's little volume on the “Psychology of Insanity,” but the viewpoints and methods of dealing with the subject matter of the two books show considerable divergence. According to the author he has made an attempt to place the facts concerning mental disease before the non-professional public—” in other words it is not a book of propaganda, but a book which seeks to stimulate intelligent non-professional interest in a serious subject, and thus make it possible for society to grapple more resolutely with the problems of the mental diseases.”
The style is excellent, the arrangement of the material fair and the text is enlivened by numerous clever and witty remarks, adding materially to the weight of the arguments, which at times contain rather odd statements suggesting a narrow point of view; for instance, “When we steak about the causes of the major mental diseases we must leave out of account the psychoanalytic and psychological points of view” because there have been differences of opinion and insufficient analytic studies made of the insanities; and again “nor is the phychological point of view, e. g., of Bernard Hart, that mental diseases are psychological situations which must be psychologically studied and treated, anything more than a philosophical pronunciamento,” also—” psychiatry as a branch of medicine is not psychology nor is it primarily interested in psychology, though secondarily it is.” “But I express perhaps only a personal belief in the following statement—pathological mood of the type which leads to the insane hospital arises either out of an inborn personality disorder or else out of disease processes; it does not arise out of ‘pure’ psychological situations, though I am frank to say that I do not know what ‘pure’ psychological situations are.” With equal sincerity one might ask what “inborn personality” disorders and “disease processes” really are.
It is obvious that