Psychology and War Conditions

I am exceedingly sensible of the high honor you have done me by inviting me to address you on this auspicious occasion, the centenary of the oldest medical association in the United States. At the outset allow me to make a confession. Although I held a chair in psychiatry on this continent before the last World War, I was never a member of the American Psychiatric Association. This entirely unimportant personal reference is chosen to illustrate a theme of considerable significance, namely, the passage of medical psychology from neurology over to psychiatry. Medical psychology, which happens to have been my special field of work—and by medical psychology I chiefly mean psychoanalysis, because there does not seem to be much medical psychology nowadays outside of psychoanalysis and its imitations—was to begin with more nearly related to neurology than to psychiatry; the pioneering names in it, from Charcot to Freud, and in this country from Weir Mitchell to Morton Prince and J. J. Putnam, are most often those of neurologists. The illusion that medical psychology is essentially an adjunct of neurology was no doubt further fostered by the unfortunate play on words in the phrase 'nervous disorders' which encouraged patients to consult physicians whose business it was to know about 'nerves' in preference to those who might well suspect them of being of unsound mind, thus confirming their own dread. In days when I had to arrange the annual meetings of the American Psychoanalytic and the American Psychopathological Associations, bodies in the founding of which I had the honor of playing a prominent part, I used to see to it that they took place in immediate conjunction with those of the American Neurological Association, of which, by the