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.
During the past fifteen years the increase in attention given to psychiatric problems has resulted in what may be termed a phenomenal development of the whole field represented by that branch of clinical medicine. Within this period of time, an overwhelming amount of literature has appeared, with here and again a textbook devoted to an abbreviated description of the subject for the orientation of students in medicine, psychology and sociology. Only a few of these texts are subjected to frequent revisions and therefore the majority, in the midst of a rapidly progressing and changing specialty, suffer the fate of practically all medical books, of remaining useful only as historical references.
With these facts in mind, we are ready to welcome a fresh presentation of the general field, such as is to be found in the book written by Doctor Noyes. The subject matter which is presented in twenty-eight chapters has been carefully selected and digested by the author during his lectures for medical students, where the material was first arranged and evaluated; and the resulting formulations have been so well done that one finds a desirable condensation of the older and more static concepts in psychiatry combined with an unusual amount of discussion of the psychobiological and genetic aspects and processes involved. The contributions of the psychoanalytical school to the dynamics of mental processes have been freely included, Freud's name appearing far more frequently in the text than that of any other authority. However, the other “schools” of thought are well represented in their several relationships.
In the first eight chapters, which deal with general mental mechanisms, dynamics, reaction types, etc., the student should be able to orient himself in the modern psychiatric point of view with its relationships to many other sciences and methodologies. Each of the remaining twenty chapters is devoted to a special mental disorder, and at the end of each chapter is an up-to-date