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For years Eysenck has been an extremely productive and influential figure in psychology. His appearance on the scene frequently presages polemics, charges, and counter-charges. As editor of this handbook, he has enlisted psychologists affiliated with Maudsley Hospital and the University of London to contribute chapters on their specialities, in which Eysenck's own basic orientation shines through all individual contributions. We have a scholarly, highly critical orientation toward much of what has been done in abnormal psychology. Abnormality “…is not in terms of classes of people suffering from mental diseases produced by definite ‘causes’; it is rather in terms of the defective functioning of certain psychological system.”
Psychiatric classification is therefore rejected and replaced by the concept of a series of trait dimensions (e.g. introversion-extroversion, neuroticism-psychoticism) objectively measurable by quantitative means. Another expected feature is the stress on experimental design, factor analysis, and the rejection of clinical and subjective methods of data collection. Thus, “…most of the published evidence was found to be