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.
It is easily appreciated why “The Psychiatric Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes” has gone into a fourth printing (a revised, enlarged edition). The facility with which Oberndorf was able to condense three voluminous stories (Elsie Venner, The Guardian Angel, and A Mortal Antipathy) into a compact psychiatric presentation is perhaps one of
the principal reasons why professional and lay readers have taken to the book. The fact that Oberndorf chose Oliver Wendell Holmes as the medium through whom to acquaint the reading public with many of the basic concepts of modern psychopathology gives added zest and validity to those concepts.
Oberndorf's book, like the psychiatric problems in Holmes’ novels, is not timed. It is a type of presentation that helps so much to spread knowledge of the fundamental truth of psychoanalysis and hence of psychotherapy to fields beyond those of skilled psychotherapists. Hence, it is destined to serve long as a guide for mental hygiene, including as it does, most of the therapeutically useful doctrines of current psychodynamics.