Richard H. Hutchings—1869–1947

Following his voluntary retirement from the New York State Hospital, June 30, 1939, after forty-seven years of active, conscientious and outstanding service, the pupils, co-workers, and friends of Richard H. Hutchings dedicated to him a number of the Psychiatric Quarterly (XIII, No. 4). My contribution to it was entitled Richard H. Hutchings, Friend of Psychoanalysis. It was the kind of a volume that the French call a mélange, and the more pretentious Germans a Festschrift. The word mélange means a mixture, and thus expresses that the volume is made up of a number of papers on problems and topics that are of interest to the honored scholar, while the word Festschrift implies, in addition, that the publication of such a volume carries with it something solemn and festive. Whatever its characterization, such a dedicative volume signifies that the dedicatee has perceptibly influenced his co-workers both as a teacher and active contributor to some branch of science. It was in this spirit that I wrote, and I quote some of the thoughts I expressed at that time because they are still as appropriate as they were in 1939.

'The degree of narcissism in our civilization is so high that no matter how well one performs his life's tasks, he usually gets little credit therefor. Our contemporaries expect us to march in line with them in the familiar, well-trodden paths which were laid down by former generations… But in the course of history, it sometimes happens that through some unconscious overdetermination there arises now and then some genius, who deviates from these familiar paths. The horde invariably becomes dismayed by his behavior and calls him revolutionary; he is looked upon with suspicion and efforts