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The Structure of our society is in transition. This is evident in medicine, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Throughout human history, novel situations required changes in the healing arts. New conceptions of the helper, the one helped and the helping process appropriate to each era took shape as well as the practices to effect these ends. In each, the physical, psychological, moral and spiritual dimensions participated. The objectives were the maintaining of well-being, the prevention of ill-being and its resolution, when present, as defined and realizable according to the possibilities of that period.
Today the image of being a patient, of being a therapist and of the therapeutic process are determined by an image of man embedded in and reflecting a society moving toward impersonality, mechanization and mass “caring” for anonymous man.
So that social welfare does not become individual “ill-fare,” it is imperative that the uniqueness of each person be identified and nurtured through our large-scale voluntary insurance and government welfare programs, which are making available a spectrum of new forms of therapy of an organic and psychological, of an individual and group nature.
Psychoanalytic training and research that is holistic and growth-oriented, and sees individual and environment as a unitary process, prepares the psychoanalyst to treat unique persons as members of an ongoing social organism. It gives him that essential openness and flexibility which is integral to his outlook; to his participation at all levels of community organization; and to his utilization of all forms of therapy, from pharmacological agents to community psychiatry.