It is generally assumed that depressions are accompanied by sleep disturbances. We have combined staff objective ratings and patients' subjective responses to study sleep in depressed and hypomanic or manic patients. We report on ten nights only, because during that period all patients were on placebo medication.

Favourable results have been reported from the use of lysergide in a wide variety of psychiatric conditions, but controlled studies (2, 3, 4) have not confirmed the existence of a therapeutic effect. In this experiment, alcoholics and neurotics who had been referred by Saskatoon psychiatrists for LSD treatment were allocated at random to Treatment and Control groups after undergoing a series of psychological tests. The members of the Treatment group were offered up to five LSD experiences at intervals of two weeks, whereas those in the Control group were informed that this type of therapy would be made available to them after a twelve-month waiting period. Accounts of the LSD experiences were sent to the referring psychiatrists, who were expected to continue to provide standard treatment to the members of both groups.

Many of the links in the chain of circumstances leading to anorexia nervosa are still not clear. Ever since Sir William Gull in 1868 first described and in, 874 named the condition, investigators have put most of the blame for it on psychological circumstances, such as an adverse relationship between mother and daughter. Tolstrup (1967), after reviewing the observations of a long list of authors, concluded that no physical explanation of note was forth-coming. Another of the many adherents of the psychogenetic school is Thomä (1961).

In a previous paper in this series (Sandier, Holder and Dare, 1970a) aspects of the doctor-patient relationship were discussed under the general heading of treatment alliance. It was pointed out that the concept included features which have been at times referred to as ‘transference’, and the purpose of the present paper is to consider some of the further meanings of the latter term.

The Regional Poisoning Treatment Centre of the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, under Dr. Henry Matthew, is located in the only locked ward in the hospital. Not only patients suffering from selfpoisoning are admitted, but also patients under police surveillance, emergency psychiatric admissions and patients with ‘delirium tremens'.

In recent years the recognition of autoimmune processes has led to important advances in our understanding of certain diseases of hitherto uncertain causation (Mackay and Burnet, 1963). In psychiatry, schizophrenia has been the main focus of studies of auto-immunity, with Heath and Krupp (1967) reporting positive results of tests for antibodies to brain cell nuclei and Whittingham et al. (1968) reporting negative results. Studies have been described (McAlpine et al., 1965) in which antibodies were detected to whole brain homogen- ates, mostly by complement-fixation, in various disease states that included multiple sclerosis. Wilkinson and Zeromski (1965) found, by immunofluorescence, serum antibodies to cytoplasm of neurones in four of eight patients with carcinomatous neuropathy.