The Hard and Soft in Psychiatry and a Glimpse of its Future

Reviews the book, Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry by Alfred M. Freedman and Harold I. Kaplan (Eds.) (see record 1967-35023-000). The book set out to present an introduction to and an overview of American psychiatry in all of its diversity while faithfully capturing its fundamentally pragmatic character. In doing so, and they certainly did, the editors and 172 other contributors, well chosen to represent psychiatry and related disciplines, have generated a fair, accurate, and generally thorough survey of the field as it is viewed, taught, and practiced today. Basic issues facing psychiatry that have been put into a meaningful perspective in this volume include: the pragmatic character of the discipline; the importance and the lack of a satisfactory diagnostic system; the ambiguous role of theory; the unsatisfactory state of knowledge concerning effects of treatment; and lastly the potentially devastating discrepancy between demands for service on the one hand and available manpower on the other. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)