BOOK REVIEWS

1. AL-ISA: Thr Ps~choparholoy~~ of Women. Prentice-Hall. Englewood $7.95.

Cliffs. New Jersey (1980). ix + 390_ pp.

The book is a vast and uneven compendium of empirical research findings, literary and artistic snippets, anecdotes and stereotypes. The general thesis is that in the psychopathology-attribution game women are consistently the losers. While much of the evidence presented is convincing in its own rtght. the overall picture is less than compelling. Some men also come out poorly in the game; men also have negative stereotypes associated with them: female doctors can be even nastier to women patients than male doctors; and while life in psychiatric hospitals is no bed of roses for anyone, surely not all bins are as unmitigatedly horrible as the author suggests. Other indices besides sex (e.g.. colour. social class. ethnic background, intelligence) can be and are used to discriminate against people in the system and it seems sexist to single out sex as the most salient.

The book’s main use will probably be as a series of literature reviews and as a bibliographical source for readers working on one or another aspect of women’s problems. There are 46 pages of references, so readers may get a lot of mileage out of it even if they cannot subscribe to the view that mental illness primarily represents a deviation from sex roles.

VICKY RIPPERE

NEIL BOLTON (Ed.): Philosophical Problems in Psychology. Methuen. London (1979). xiii + 207 pp. Paperback f4.50.

This volume is a welcome addition to Methuen’s “Psychology in Progress” series. It contains papers on a variety of topics in philosophical psychology, the general theme of which is the nature of action. The first two papers (by Philip Pettit and Cohn M&inn) concern the relation of action to reason. These papers as well as others distinguish action from mere bodily movement: action admits of explanation in terms of reasons. is intentional. is identified by descriptions which presuppose, for example, social norms. Several papers then consider the kind of account psychology should give of action, these being on genetic epistemology (Wolfe Mays), on space (Michael Morgan). on the foundations of psychology (N.E. Wetherick) and on the computa- tional metaphor (Margaret A. Boden). A third section, on “the context of action”, concerns possible limitations of an empirical psychology of action, and includes papers on the concept of perception (Arthur Still). on phenomenology (Neil Bolton) and on theory in psychotherapy (John Heaton).

While the papers are not concerned directly with clinical practice, certainly some of their arguments are relevant e.g.. some serve as reminders that the models used in behaviour therapy perhaps err on the over-simple side. And the paper most concerned with therapy, John Heaton’s, goes further in questioning the assumption basic to diverse schools. that the process of therapeutic change can be adequately grasped by means of scientific models and methods. Generally the papers are authoritative, and the volume may be recommended both to teachers and students of philosophical psychology. And since generally the subject is approached from the viewpoint of psychology rather than philosophy, the book should be useful to interested psychologists without formal philosophical training.

DEREK BOLTON

D. B. COHEN: Sleep and Dreaming. Origin Nature and Function. Pergamon Press, New York (1979). ix + 315 pp. f 13.50.

This book is a comprehensive review of research and theoretical speculation on dreaming and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Six hundred reports. a number of which are original contributions by Cohen. form the basis of the presentation.

The first half of the book presents discussions of the nature of REM sleep. There are chapters on the electrophysiological nature of REM and the changes in REM with age and across species. A particularly interesting chapter. “Information Processing during REM Sleep” reviews research on the effects of stresses, presented before and during sleep. on REM activity. It is perhaps not surprising however. to read Cohen’s conclusion that dreaming sleep is more concerned with previously stored information than with material received during sleep. The effect of REM deprivation on the recall and acquisition of information is given a similarly interesting treatment in this chapter. The final chapter here deals with REM deprivation and effects on motivation. The effect of individual differences in this is discussed in an exhaustive and bewildering fashion. The second half of the book deals with dream recall including presleep and other influences on this activity. Subject differences here are again discussed.

The author is critical about a number of basic assumptions which have been made in the literature. For

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