This book is intended primarily for those readers who have had no professional training in either Medicine or Psychology, but who are anxious to keep themselves abreast of modern thought in these departments of knowledge. At the same time I hope it may prove serviceable to professional students of these subjects as a preliminary survey of the ground they will have to cover should they desire to specialize in psychotherapies or in the psychology of the abnormal. The topics discussed have been dealt with only in outline. My endeavour has been to state the general principles on which modern conceptions in the Psychology of Medicine are based and to avoid as far as possible all detail which is unncessary for comprehension of these principles.

This book is intended primarily for those readers who have had no professional training in either Medicine or Psychology, but who are anxious to keep themselves abreast of modern thought in these departments of knowledge. At the same time I hope it may prove serviceable to professional students of these subjects as a preliminary survey of the ground they will have to cover should they desire to specialize in psychotherapies or in the psychology of the abnormal. The topics discussed have been dealt with only in outline. My endeavour has been to state the general principles on which modern conceptions in the Psychology of Medicine are based and to avoid as far as possible all detail which is unncessary for comprehension of these principles.

The material in this book is an expansion of a lecture given at the Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C., on May 15, 1933. I have thought it best to leave it in the somewhat informal discourse of the lecture platform. References to the literature, and other annotations, are numbered consecutively and placed together at the end of the book. It should be pointed out here at the start, as it is in the text, that the author is not a medical man, but merely a biologist greatly interested in human biology; aware of his deficiencies in knowledge and experience consequent upon not having an equally lively sense of his inalienable right as a biologist to study man, the most interesting of all animals.

The British Journal of Medical Psychology is an international journal with a traditional orientation towards psychodynamic issues. While maintaining a broad theoretical base and insisting upon sound and sensible methodology, its objective is to avoid the more simplistic approaches to psychological science. The Journal aims to bring together the medical and psychological disciplines. Collaborative studies between psychiatrists and psychologists are especially encouraged. Original theoretical and research contributions are invited from the fields of psychodynamic and interpersonal psychology, particularly as they have a bearing upon vulnerability to, adjustment to and recovery from both medical and psychological disorders. The Journal aims to promote theoretical and research developments in the fields of subjective psychological states and dispositions, interpersonal attitudes, behaviour and relationships only if they illustrate unusual forms of psychopathology or innovative forms of therapy which carry important theoretical implications.

Tense Past provides a much needed appraisal and contextualization of the upsurge of interest in questions of memory and trauma evident in multiple personality and post-traumatic stress disorders, child abuse, and commemoration of the Holocaust. Contributors examine the historical origins of memory in psychiatric discourse and show its connection to broader developments in Western science and medicine. They address the new links between trauma and memory, and they explore how memory shapes the way traumatic events are put into narrative form. They also consider the social and political contexts in which sufferers speak and remember.