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In this book, Dr. Masserman has made a heroic attempt to correlate certain basic principles of psychiatry, utilizing a many-sided approach in an attempt to integrate apparently conflicting schools of thought. His formulations rest on three basic supports—1) the psychobiologic school of Adolf Meyer, 2) the more advanced non-rigid aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis, and 3) the contributions of animal experimental psychology built upon the original Pavlovian school, and in which the author has played such a significant role. He provides an excellent summary of the basic concepts and literature of these various approaches. In his final formulations, however, he tends to identify most closely and lean toward the experimental aspects of the problem, and places the greatest emphasis on those psychodynamic principles which are capable of reproduction in the laboratory set-up.
He labels the attempted fusion of these three approaches, the biodynamic point of view and outlines its purposes and goals as follows:
1. “Its theory must be firmly rooted in biologic observation and must be compatible with established biologic principles, such as those governing the evolution and the structural and physiologic relationships of living organisms, including man.
2. Biodynamics must deal with empiric observations of behavior in their context. This means that its approach must be holistic, and not prejudiced by “physiologic,” “psychologic,” nor even “psychosomatic” part-concepts, inasmuch as all three terms designate either artificially isolated aspects of the whole or their post-hoc correlation. Similarly, the theory must transcend the spurious dichotomy of “organism versus environment” and instead consider the latter as selectively integrated into the organism's field of reaction.
3. Biodynamic theory must cover the whole range of behavior from ameba to man, yet neither regard these as polar opposites nor neglect the quantitative and qualitative differences and complexities that distinguish