What are the bases of the intense public interest in psychiatry? Galdston suggests that the phenomenal disruptive changes in man's relationship to himself and his world in the past one hundred and fifty years lead him to seek in psychiatry a rationale of those former values—existent for millenia—which had helped sustain him. Man seeks 'to discover the mortal mainspring of hope, love, and charity, and also of evil'. Three particularly significant changes have been the disappearance of the homestead with its stabilizing and educating influences, the degradation of woman's position in the family, and the loss in prestige and power of religious influence in teaching and fostering man's altruism. Psychiatry is not the answer to man's problems, but a science which can help man illuminate, lighten, and prevent many of his troubles.