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A number of volumes have been recently appearing in the psychological literature which are essentially collected contributions from a number of authors discussing some specific subject. This volume edited by Lindner and Seliger deals with “a branch of applied medical art and science which properly restricts itself to the understanding and treatment of individuals under conditions of detention.” It is made up of some forty-seven articles, each written by an expert in his field. It suffers from the usual problems of such a collected volume in that the various articles are not at all related or discussed by the editors, and the book can at best only be considered as a collection of reprints neatly bound. The individual articles are too numerous to discuss, covering such subjects as “Interpreting the Defendant to the Court”, “Electroencephalogra-phy, the Clinical Recognition of Mental Deficiency”, “Prison Medicine as a Specialty,” “Psychopathic Behavior Disorders in Children” and “The Meaning of Punishment”.
The quality of the individual essays is extremely variable, depending on the skill and experience of the author. It is unfortunate in this instance that no editing was done since some of the essays present complete discussions of the problem under consideration and others seem to be simply superficial reviews of well-known techniques. The chapter on “Psychometric Procedure” presents nothing new and is simply a review of well-known tests which have all been better described elsewhere. This is also true of the chapter on the “Clinical Recognition of Mental Deficiency” which duplicates much of the material given under psychometric procedure. On the other hand, the articles on “Psychopathic Behavior Disorders in Children”, “Basic Considerations of the Concept of Psychopathic Personality”, and “Psychotherapy in a Prison Setting”, are particularly good. Occasional chapters such as “The Understanding and Management of Gastric Neuroses”, “Anxiety States and their Intramural