During the psychiatry year of my neurology training in the Netherlands, I asked to rotate to the chronic ward, and I was told by the director of the psychiatric institution that "a neurologist needs to know about personality disorders, not acute psychosis." Unfazed, I persisted, and once there, I entered a world different from what I knew, with restless, markedly distressed patients with severe mental illness. What stuck in my mind was the (false) dichotomy between psychodynamic principles explaining neurosis and neuro-biology explaining psychosis. Allan Ropper and Brian Burrell's fascinating, sure-footed, and illuminating book shows how these disciplines wandered off, but cannot be easily combined (or ful ly separated).
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