Mental Abnormality: Facts and Theories
- Author:
Millais Culpin, M.D., F.R.C.S. Hutchinson’s
University Library. 7s. 6d.
Dr Culpin has long been well known as a masterly and entertaining champion in the fight against prejudice, and one can imagine no better author for such a title. His small book is well written and will appeal to the lay public: but it also contains much wisdom for the general practitioner and for the psychiatrist.
He sets out to survey the whole field of psychiatry, so that great clinical detail is obviously impossible: nevertheless there is ample compensation for the lack of this in the lucidity of Dr Culpin’s style and his refreshing commonsense approach.
An interesting and welcome innovation in a text book on psychiatry is Dr Culpin’s inclusion of many phenomena usually regarded as within the territory of the spiritualist,?thought-reading, waterdivining, and mediumism: these are described mostly from the author’s own personal experience, and analysed in terms of psychological mechanisms, and certainly should be widely read.
His last chapter on the place of psychopathology in human affairs is all too short: but if his aim is to provoke discussion on this theme he will certainly succeed, although the average reader may be rather keenly disappointed that he is given no more of Dr Culpin’s own views. R.F.T.
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