Understandable Psychiatry
- Author:
Prof. Leland
Hinsie, M.D. The Macmillan Company, New York. 22s. 6d.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature about this remarkable book is its choice of title, for it would ?e hard to find a parallel for it, in its combination ?f flamboyant style and confusing content.
No doubt Professor Hinsie understands his own Particular brand of psychopathological theory, but is difficult for the reader to do so. Lip service ls frequently paid to Freudian theory, and psychoanalytical terms are used in many chapters, but the Waning given to them in this book is frequently entirely different from that devised by Freud and accepted by most psychiatric workers. But, in addition, the author uses numerous other strange technical terms, many of which are entirely unnecessary and all of which are very ugly. As examples may be quoted ” Psychalgia ” (mental Pain as opposed to physical pain or somatalgia); Altrigenderism and Suigenderism ” (apparently ^presenting hetero- and homo-sexuality with some special obscure significance of their own) and Psychoscopy” (which is defined as mental microscopy). The book is liberally spattered with sentences in italics. Some of these italicized Passages contain points of importance and worthy ?f stressing, but the use of italics is so frequent, and much of the content is so banal, that they Quickly cease to be of any value and become only an irritating interruption of one’s reading. According to the author’s preface this book was written equally for the physician and the patient. Its intentions are clearly good and there is something of value, especially in its later chapters, if the reader will have the patience to extract these points from the mass of verbiage. It is, therefore, regrettable that the result as a whole is so confusing. In its present form it is likely to irritate the physician who reads it, confuse or disturb the patient according to his degree of insight and do a good deal to harm psychiatry in the eyes of its critics. T.A.R.
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