OUT OF ITS MIND (Book Review)

Psychiatry is in disarray. Having abandoned Freud, it is struggling torestore itself as a medical science based on neuroscience. Author J. Allan Hobson, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, with the help of medical writer Jonathan Leonard, describes and applauds this transformation. Yet he argues that neuroscience alone is not sufficient: The role of experience in mental illness must also be recognized. Psychiatry, he suggests, "must rest squarely on the strong shoulders of learning theory."