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.
Those readers who are personally acquainted with the author of this book will open it up with keen anticipation. Knowing Dr. White's genial personality, his wide range of friendships among the leaders of his profession and indeed among the leaders in all walks of life, his splendid sense of humor and his genius as a raconteur, they will all be set for a peep behind the scenes of psychiatry. They will expect, for example, to find out what Freud said to Jung when they parted, what Jelliffe's golf score is and whether or not Adolf Meyer used the Culbertson system. The present reviewer, indeed, opened the pages expecting one of those autobiographies in which the illustrious author, untrussed and sitting at his ease among his intimates, regales them with anecdotes of the great and the near great.
The first feeling, then, in beginning to read Dr. White's book, is one of disappointment. Here is no introspective autobiography nor bouquet of anecdotes but a sober, straightforward tale of nearly half a century of work. The tale is told simply, earnestly, almost impersonally. At first one feels that here is a prosaic and possibly not very interesting document, a record to be sure, of a life well spent but perhaps a little on the soporific side. Before getting very far into the volume, however, one begins to feel the vitality of the author. Here is a tremendously alive person who was not content merely to carry forward the humanitarian traditions of his predecessors but while preserving them, to create something new.