Review of So you're going to a psychiatrist.

Abstract

severe." Let us not attempt to condemn by faint praise. The best that can be said for this book is that it is "easy reading" for the intelligent layman. In the opinion of this psychologist, Dr. Adamson has failed in her attempt to give an accurate account of modern psychiatric thought. If her representation of psychiatry is accurate, then much of psychiatry must be labeled as pure nonsense. It is said, for example, that the criminal character is an expression of repressed childish conflicts and that he is the victim of retained infantile mechanisms. Further on we read that "Probably the most effective general approach to the problem of crime is to treat it as a contagious disorder acquired by children chiefly from parental 'carriers.' " Such statements, unsupported as they are by scientific data, suggest naivete on the part of the author in accepting the doctrines of psychoanalysis without the critical point of view.The author has succeeded in accenting the psychoanalytic point of view rather than the psychiatric. Witness the interpretation of manic-depressive psychosis on page 48 where it is pointed out that those suffering from manic-depressive psychoses have personalities which yield first to the Super-Ego for a few weeks, months, or years, and then to their Id. Even the layman is forced to smile at the in absentia diagnoses which are made, especially that of the fictional character Don Juan who, it is said, is regarded by psychiatry as a latent homosexual.The reader gains the impression from the reading of this book that psychiatry is not a recent development, highly speculative, but rather a closed chapter of explanations, fully matured, not having required the binding ties of experimental methods, nor requiring them in the future. Statements are propounded as dogma; statistics are never cited. Terms are freely used without attempts at exact definition. Critical differences'