REVIEWS 157 



recovery ; (2) to make the treatment for this reason effective ; and (3) to 

 make prevention of the disease possible. / 



Problems of the Mind are always alluring, but they are also elusive. 

 We have had them explained to us in a strange and weird vocabulary from 

 Vienna. The emotions are to-day " ab-reacted," they may become " sub- 

 limated " or "converted," and the "affect" is "suppressed" or disso- 

 ciated. A mysterious endo-psychic censor exercises a constant domination, 

 even during sleep, over the thoughts and emotions, which are sometimes 

 expelled as by a " cathartic." Our mental processes are said to be so in- 

 timately connected with the reproductive system that an invariable corre- 

 lation is believed to exist between sex disturbances and mental disorders, 

 a view which is certainly not within the experience of most British observers. 

 It is maintained by this same group of continental workers and those who 

 support them in this country that even dementia prsecox is due to inci- 

 dents which have been actively forgotten by repression after conflict, and 

 that these memories dominate the unconscious mind and cause a dissocia- 

 tion of the normal " complexes " — a complex being a group of ideas with 

 its emotional tone. The strong desire to realise the natural physiological 

 relation between the mind and the body has been the reason for collecting 

 and publishing the material incorporated in this volume. The Editor 

 points out that in the 400 mental hospitals of the United States, dementia 

 praecox implies an annual expenditure of ;^5, 000,000, that each year con- 

 tributes a total of 20,000 crippled youths permanently damaged, and that 

 their total number in mental hospitals or asylums is approximately 130,000, 

 each patient being maintained for an average period of fifteen years after 

 his or her admission. The present volume is the first outcome of this serious 

 effort to study one form of mental disease with thoroughness, and prob- 

 ably with one exception — viz. our own study of cancer as an Imperial in- 

 vestigation — the work of this society stands alone, and the volume presented 

 is unique. 



Dementia praecox may now claim to be a mental disease responding to 

 a definite clinical picture. It attacks youths, broadly speaking, between 

 the ages of fifteen and thirty years, and these emerge from families whose 

 members belong to all grades of society and who would appear to be other- 

 wise mentally well-endowed. Its characteristic mental symptom is " un- 

 emotionalism," and the group is described as a silent armj^ of insane ado- 

 lescents filing into homes which harbour the hopeless, all the boys and 

 girls passing from apparent mental health into confirmed mental decay. 



The volume under review is a faithful record of work done in the chemi- 

 cal, physiological, and psychometric laboratory as well as at the bedside 

 and in the wider fields of morphology and biology ; in fact every means of 

 investigation which can throw any light upon the nature of the disease 

 has been employed, not only with the object of relieving the sufferer, but 

 also in the hope of kindling an interest in others and encouraging social 

 workers, scientific explorers in other branches, and inquirers into human 

 welfare also to help and to contribute to the relief of this class, which is 

 believed to swell the list of juvenile suicides, of young delinquents, of much 

 of the nervous breakdown among young people as well as of much mal- 

 adjustment and human wastage. 



It has been already foreshadowed and may now be stated definitely that 

 there are two opposite views as to the cause of dementia praecox. One school 

 holds that all abnormal mental states and disturbed mental conditions are 

 due to some disturbances of the subconscious complexes, that there has 

 been a repression of the natural tendencies and the instincts, giving rise 

 to a conflict of ideas on a group of ideas with their emotions, which has 

 caused a dissociation of the personality resulting in the mental breakdown. 

 The opposing school regards this disturbance as primarily caused by some 



