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The author is the pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and evidently is one of the ‘cloth’ who became aware early that there is such a discipline as psychiatry. His father was Super in a mental hospital. Dr. Ames offers a small but not very inspiring foreword when one considers the opportunity offered him.
Nor do we find that Dr. Bonnell has really gotten into a real gestalt pattern for he still bandies about such tattered and threadbare phrases as
“soul” and “spiritual” in true theological manner. We wish he had gone to Homer for his idea of the soul, rather than to Liddell and Scott's dictionary. Here as with Socrates our sympathies lie, not in a dictionary, classic though it be. We feel certain his father used no theological phrases.
We hold that the clergy need psychiatric instruction and guidance. Perhaps they will take it in homeopathic doses as here offered. At all events the trend is worth encouraging, even though we feel that psychiatry is for the physician, who if he be a good psychiatrist I venture he is better acquainted with the ‘soul’ than the theologian.