Kieve has been practicing psychiatry for ten years in the rural communities of New Mexico where he met some special problems which decisively influenced the patients' prognoses and the aims of treatment. In the rural community the psychiatrist is looked upon as a potentially dangerous and wicked force who endangers the interdependence of the family unit. This greater dependency of the individual members of the family upon one another tends to make the patient and his family seek the psychiatrist only when their family life is threatened. These patients want to be relieved of symptoms in order to return to the family and not to achieve any real structural changes in their personality.