Clinical Psychology in Transition. A Selection of Articles from The American Psychologist. Complied by John Richard Braun. The Psychology Series under the editorship of Calvin S. Hall. Cleveland:  Howard Allen, Inc., 1961.  211 pp. Not priced.

Braun has brought together a collection of articles in which questions of major significance to clinicians are discussed: What role should diagnostic testing play in therapy? In what sense can it be said that the therapist is (or is not) being scientific? Should we train psychologist-scientists to meet the demand for improvement of therapeutic technique and theory? When does refraining from guiding a patient who is in the throes of a difficult decision amount to an abdication from the educative role and the social responsibility of the therapist? Does the certification law represent an unfortunate compromise for the clinician which offers sanction for the less competent person to practice therapy? How are normalcy and mental illness defined?

The answers offered are the result of recent studies representing various “schools” of psychological thinking. The analyst should find this sharing of information and opinion regarding his discipline invaluable.

The question of the use and role of diagnostic material in clinical work is considered in two articles by Paul E. Meehl and Alan P. Towbin respectively. The former advocates a “cookbook” method which, while certainly not used by most practitioners and perhaps not the best solution, offers one answer to the plight of those “40% of the young clinicians” who stated recently that “they would not go into clinical psychology if they had it to do again.” Meehl suggests that it is the failure of the field to understand to proper use of diagnostic tools which has precipitated this situation.

That the clinician should aid in “the formulation of a hypothetical deductive systematization” of his raw data is proposed by Carlton Berenda. Attributing the difficulty in theorizing to the personality differences of workers in this field, he advocates the “cooperative use of all such workers in establishing a sort of overlapping continuum of personalities, ranging from those most therapeutically empathetic to those most adept at logical and sy