Symposia do not make for satisfactory reading, particularly when, as in this volume, more than one symposium is combined in book form. Considering the original sense of the term, one wonders why, in speech feasts, the spirits are so watered down. Of the twenty-six papers forming the volume, some are excellent, others good, and the rest mediocre rather than bad. This seems to reflect the present nature of contributions of psychiatry to education.
What, I asked myself, would a symposium volume be like in which educators discussed the present state of psychiatry, the contributions that they, as educators, could make to its practice, and what, from their point of view, was wrong with it? I concluded that such a volume would probably make equally poor reading. So perhaps it is well for both disciplines that teachers do not hold symposia in which they discuss their contribution to psychiatry, and what