The Commonsense Psychiatry of Adolph Meyer ed. by Alfred Lief

Abstract

410 BOOK REVIEWS the technique to see how far it can be pushed. Fortunately, the technique of art cannot be pushed much further. The artist is bound to start looking for something worth while to express by his art. That is why he needs a theology of art. * * * G. Thils' second volume is concerned with a theology of history, that is, with a theological interpretation of temporal duration. The early section is reminiscent of the dialectical approach of an Aristotle. Thils presents various contemporary opinions and works through_to his own presentation. He affirms that human history has a meaning and that it is intelligible in the light of divine revelation. He utilizes tl:.e contrast, Flesh-Spirit, familiar to the student of St. John and St. Paul, as the basic revealed insight into human history. Having explained its meaning according to modern exegetes, he shows how it may be used as a criterion for judging the phenomena of human history, as a guide for human action in the temporal field, and as a prognostic of the future development of the human struggle. He finds numerous reasons for optimism and they are well founded. There is no reason to think, he says, that the battle between good and evil here below will end in a tie. While here again we would prefer much greater philosophical analysis, the author has succeeded in presenting an excellent example of what should be a theology of terrestrial reality. We hope that he wiU continue his studies along these lines. We espe~ially hope that others will come to his assistance; a thorough study of the Fathers of the Church on all these questions would be invaluable. There can be no doubt that in the traditional instruments of divine revelation and sane philosophy we have the efficacious means to establish a theology of the world we live in and thereby lead every intellect captive to the truth and restore all things to Christ, which are the obligations placed upon us by St. Paul. Collegia Angelicum, Rome, Italy. JAMES M. EGAN, 0. P. The Commonsense Psychiatry of Adolph Meyer. Selected papers edited by Alfred Lief. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948. Pp. 677. $6.50. When Adolph Meyer died on March 17, 1950, he received what this reviewer believed to be quite inadequate obituaries in both The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune. Here was a man who was certainly one of the most outstanding thinkers psychiatry has had. He was the man who by nature and training was able to integrate much of BOOK REVIEWS 411 the knowledge of his time about people, knowledge formerly walled off in medicine or education or sociology or philosophy which he was able to put together in a total " science of man." The obituaries did not recognize· this; rather both of them mentioned him as the man who in 1933 " made a nine month's study of Giuseppe Zangara, the assassin who fired at the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt and killed Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago instead. 'We should decline the idea of a criminal brain,' Dr. Meyer said afterward." (New York Herald Tribune, March 18, 1950). This last statement implies that the answer as to why Zangara was a criminal is to be found not in a study of the brain but his whole life. To be sure, Dr. Meyer was a very careful student of neuroanatomy and neuropathology. He undoubtedly studied this brain very thoroughly because he had, prior to this time, been interested in the assassins of President William McKinley and of President James Garfield. He had thought then that these assassins were poorly handled by the psychiatrists who failed to take into consideration the total life history of these men. Certainly, if he spent nine months on the brain of the 1933 assassin, he did it chiefly in order to answer those people who would attempt to overlook a study of the facts of a man's life and offer false but apparently scientific explanations based on brain anatomy and brain physiology. Dr. Meyer was interested not only in the structural functions of a person's brain; he wanted to know all the...