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No one is better qualified to record a history of the dynamics of American psychiatry than Dr. White, our revered leader and colleague. Gifted with a clear vision of the deeper meaning of movements and events, a gift which undoubtedly participated in his election of psychiatry as a career and endowed also with the capacity of expressing himself clearly and convincingly, he has summarized in this small volume the growth of psychiatric conceptions in his own mind and, what is almost the same, in his native land.
For what Dr. White was able to see he gladly passed on to others and this made him one of the leaders of the profession, both scientifically and politically. That he has never lacked the courage of his convictions is well known, and perhaps it is because of this rather than in spite of it that he has stood at the head of the profession notwithstanding his early espousal of the unpopular cause of psychoanalysis. Later, when the administrative functions of the "old-fashioned" hospital superintendent were exciting the contempt or at least the disavowal of those who felt that psychiatry should concern itself only with the clinical minutiæ of hospital patients, he likewise came to the defense of "these sturdy gentlemen" and in one of his most felicitous passages pointed out that skilful provisions for the care of the mentally sick were intimately and inseparably related to the scientific understanding of their condition, and that the administration of a hospital for the mentally sick is no less a special division of psychiatry than the examination of the spinal fluid or the interpretation of a dream.
Psychoanalysis in particular will admire the courage of his defense of psychoanalysis at the meeting of the American Medical Association in 1914, when the opposition to psychoanalysis was led by an exceedingly powerful and respected psychiatrist, Dr. Carlos McDonald, president of the Association, and also president of the Lunacy Commission of New York State. The well