210

American Anthropologist

[60, 19581

CULTURE AND PERSONALITY

Ittterpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personulity Evaluation. TIMOTHY
LEARY.New York: The Ronald Press, 1957. xix,
518 pp., appendix, 58 tables, 62 figures. $12.00.
Reviewed by BERTWLAN,
University of Kansas
This important volume attempts to derive from the brilliant but generally unsystematized insights of the psychiatrist, Harry Stack Sullivan, a system of variables and
concepts suitable for the workaday problems in the description and diagnosis of personality. As such, its direct importance to anthropologists is somewhat limited. Nevertheless, anthropologists will regard with interest an attempt to introduce precision
and operational rigor into a theoretical schema which places the interpersonal and
communicative dimensions of behavior in the foreground. Leary does not consider
systematically the sociocultural contexts of personality processes, but rather tries to
understand the significance of behavior by focusing on its communicative aspects, that
is, on the meaning which it has, or is intended to have, for some other person or persons. Therefore, the reader who is looking for a new liaison between psychiatric and
sociological theory is apt to be disappointed.
The honesty, rigor, and methodological sophistication of this work are impressive.
Especially valuable to the culture and personality worker is a technique for summarizing a number of personality ratings as a single point which can be plotted in relationship
to the mean of the group. The extent and location of clustering of such points will indicate modes within the group. This device seems directly applicable to the description
of the nature of uniformity and variability within groups, a key empirical problem in
the culture and personality area.
Despite these positive features, the reviewer must confess to a certain amount of
uneasiness about certain aspects of the book. The use of the term interpersonalJ
to modify a strange assortment of nouns such as emotions, motives, fantasies, perceptions, roles, diagnoses, gestures, purposes, is not only disconcertingly ungrammatical
but leaves the reader to figure out for himself what might be meant by such a phrase as,
for example, interpersonal fantasy. I n following this usage throughout his book, Leary
labels any personality phenomenon which involves or refers to a second person as interpersona1,despite the fact that its major significance may becompletely intrapsychic.
One wonders why a theory emphasizing interpersonal relations cannot simul taneously develop concepts for phenomena which are only superficially interpersonal.

Remotivating the Mental Patient. OTTOVON MERINGand STANLEY

H. KING. New York:
Russell Sage Foundation, 1957. 216 pp. $3.00.
Reviewed by MARVINK. OPLER,Cornell University Medical College
This book by an anthropologist and a social psychologist, both of the University
of Pittsburgh, appears in a series of excellent works on patient care published by the
Russell Sage Foundation. One by M. Greenblatt, R. York and E. L. Brown, From
Custodial to Therapeutic Patient Care in Mental Hospitals, had greater historical and
psychological scope. Another by M. S. Schwartz and E. Shockley was on The Nurse
and the Mental Patient, and there was also the Basic Books publication by A. H. Stanton and M. S. Schwartz on The Mental Hospital, with its larger theoretical structure
and more generous testing of hypotheses.
The present book is a welcome illustration of how an anthropologist and a psychol-