  We give a comprehensive self-contained review on the rigorous analysis of the
thermodynamics of a class of random spin systems of mean field type whose most
prominent example is the Hopfield model. We focus on the low temperature phase
and the analysis of the Gibbs measures with large deviation techniques. There
is a very detailed and complete picture in the regime of ``small $\a$''; a
particularly satisfactory result concerns a non-trivial regime of parameters in
which we prove 1) the convergence of the local ``mean fields'' to gaussian
random variables with constant variance and random mean; the random means are
from site to site independent gaussians themselves; 2) ``propagation of
chaos'', i.e. factorization of the extremal infinite volume Gibbs measures, and
3) the correctness of the ``replica symmetric solution'' of Amit, Gutfreund and
Sompolinsky [AGS]. This last result was first proven by M. Talagrand [T4],
using different techniques.
