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As problematic as any idea in the field of mental health is the concept of “mental health” itself. The unfortunate fact is that consensus has never been reached about how to define the term (e.g., Coan, 1977; Johoda, 1958), or about how to classify the forms of mental illness (McLemore and Benjamin, 1979; Schact and Nathan, 1977). Some even regard words like “health” and “illness” as misleading scientific fictions, too often used to justify establishment values (Townsend, 1978; Laing, 1967; Szasz, 1961). And yet it also is true that such judgements cannot be avoided. Each time psychotherapy is undertaken, effective choices between more and less desired forms of functioning are inevitable. The intention of this paper is to describe one possible way to set criteria, using an operational definition of mental health. It is supported by empirical research employing newer methods for identifying levels of interpersonal functioning.
The interpersonal approach has elicited considerable enthusiasm in recent decades, at least in the generic sense that includes object relations theory. As an elaboration of ego psychology, it has brought new ways of thinking about mental health in terms of how the individual relates to others. When Freud proposed his hypotheses of psychosexual development, the description of maturity as genitality implied more, of course, than sexual relations.