Preventive recall to hospital of a patient on a community treatment order can be lawful when it is based on a convincing prediction that relapse in illness would otherwise occur. The legislation for England and Wales provides several indications that authorising preventive recall in those circumstances is a purpose of the community treatment order regime.

Drs. Stern and Whiles, in an interesting and provocative article in the January issue (1), claim to have solved the problem of Hamlet on the assumption that Hamlet suffered from the Ganser state occurring during the course of another psychosis. By this theory they hope to reconcile the seemingly contradictory views that Hamlet was insane, and that he was pretending to be so. He was both, they say, and the latter because of his being in the Ganser state.

The authors claim to have examined the problem from a strictly psychiatric viewpoint; but it must be remembered that such a viewpoint is necessarily subject to many limitations, inasmuch as there exists no parallel to Hamlet in actuality. One has constantly to bear in mind that Hamlet is not an historical personage, but a character in a play, and that our task is not to explain some Hamlet of our own, but Shakespeare's Hamlet; and in consequence our theories must not only be psychologically acceptable, but must conform with the text of the play which, after all, is the final arbiter. With this in mind, a psychiatric study of Hamlet may be of great value, but it need not and perhaps cannot be expected to “explain” Hamlet.

It has been suggested (Mednick, 1958) that high drive acting “upon remote response tendencies is a major root of the disordered thinking of schizophrenics”. Thought disorder would be a product of a high level of drive, increasing generalization and reducing discrimination. The relevant drive in this context is anxiety.

Carl Rogers, who died in California in 1987 at the age of 85, was ranked in a late-1970s survey of American clinical psychologists and counsellors as being the psychotherapist who most influenced them, surpassing such stalwarts as Sigmund Freud and Joseph Wolpe. This book was the fourth one that he published and is reputedly the most renowned. In the UK it is his best-selling book, being reprinted on average every 18 months and having sold about 4000 copies in the last two years.