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A review of the diversified psychotherapies which have been devised to bring about a change in the patient's psychological attitude to enable him to convert pathological symptoms into a healthy state establishes that psychoanalysis most nearly approximates a scientific approach. The theory of its therapeutic operation is well established. The technique by which the theoretical principles can be applied to achieve beneficial results is being taught in numerous psychoanalytic institutes—notably in the United States.
The application of psychoanalytic ideology to social problems and the practice of psychoanalytic therapy have gained a wider recognition in this country than elsewhere. This is due, I believe, largely to the fact that from the time of its introduction in America more than forty years ago psychoanalysis has been advanced as a medical discipline, and its active proponents attempted to coöperate closely with the other medical specialties—and especially with psychiatry of which it is essentially a part and to which it has contributed so abundantly. The great increase in the demand for psychoanalytic therapy has attracted a proportionately larger number of physicians to the field, some of whom possibly have less intrinsic interest in and characterological adaptability for this specialty than those who chose it thirty to forty years ago when it was less popular.
The members of the Psychoanalytic Association are physicians who offer their services to relieve persons afflicted with bodily and psychical dysfunctions resulting from mental conflict, conscious as well as unconscious. For their therapeutic ministrations they are remunerated—sometimes in a not too niggardly way, it is rumored. However, a review of two outstanding