Lichtenstein, Morris. Cures For Minds In Distress. New York:  The Jewish Science Publishing Co.

This book would weigh the bearing of medical, psychoanalytic and religious conceptions in regard to common problems in nervous and mental disease. The author stresses inner resources of the organism for individual mental health, and bases his interpretation of what he conceives to be the substance of medical and psychoanalytic therapy in regard to their comparative accessibility to these resources. Main emphasis is on the validity of prayer and religious experience as therapeutic agents.

Part I consists of four chapters: Introduction, Medical Cures, Psychoanalysis, and Religious Method. Part II offers descriptive accounts of individual cases of illness comprising neurasthenia, melancholia, mania, hysteria, epilepsy, paranoia, dementia præcox, complexes, “abnormal impulses,” “insomnia.” Each class of disorder is considered under the headings of the three procedures. The last chapter deals with twelve recorded cases purporting to show the response to treatment by prayer.

“Cures for Minds in Distress” may be recommended only as a statement of certain conceptions dealing with the religious approach to mental illness. Its qualifications along more material lines leave too much to be desired in the full grasp of their working nature to give the approach here elected more than subjective value. The fragmentary quality of sections on medicine and psychoanalysis is particularly evident in the pages on psychoanalytic method. To cite the general and particular misconceptions in this regard would require more space than is available here. In addition to the general attitude which assumes religio-moralistic standpoints (re sexuality) as critical factors against the findings of psychoanalysis, there is evident here the same lack of practicable knowledge as to what it is about common to other accounts derived from a partial and prejudiced abstracting of texts.