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This volume presents the forty-nine papers, twenty invited formal discussions and twenty-one informal discussions which were given at the Symposium on Mental Health held under the auspices of the Section on Medical Sciences of the A.A.A.S. at Richmond, Virginia, in December 1938.
Of the ninety printed papers, some are very good, many are informative and provocative, and some are very bad. But with the syphilologist, the epidemiologist, the pathologist, the statistician and the psychobiologist each hawking his separate ware, one must expect to find that the sum of the parts does not add up to any particular whole. Furthermore, although there are a good many highly interesting facts and results of surveys presented, one can not escape the impression that what in general is being talked about bears only a very oblique relationship to mental health, either of the individual or the community. What seems patently lacking is any philosophical attempt to evaluate critically what is going on in terms other than those of current focal illusions or ideological slogans, and what is needed is less advancement of science and more clarification of human values.
The tendency of science to outrun its supposed goals and to grow away from basic human values is indeed less characteristic of psychiatric science than of the physical technologies. But that this tendency exists at all in a department of science prsumably sensitive to the deep and timid needs of the individual is disturbing; and it is in just such a 'broad' symposium as the present one that we begin to detect that subtle shift of emphasis from the individual to the group, from the bee to the hive, which is elsewhere so ominously evident in the complex texture of our time. Thus