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In his 1962 Presidential Address before the American Orthopsychiatric Association, Redl challenges the profession to speak out and tell what it knows but takes for granted about children and their service needs. Knowledge must be
translated into action, and toward this end he offers a thoughtful, forthright, and richly illustrated review of the salient problems in the field. This paper is a major work of social analysis and criticism because it considers not only the changing needs of children but also the professional attitudes and practices which impede the implementation of knowledge.
Seven major areas are discussed: 1, collective regressive and primitive defenses against the voice of professional conscience; 2, the negative prejudicial stereotypes directed against children; 3, community diseases including the guilt-free failure to implement high-powered model programs, interagency jealousies, and interdisciplinary jurisdictional disputes; 4, abuses in research practices arising out of administrative attitudes including government financing (he cites the greater conscientiousness about computers over facts, the misuse of 'control groups' and 'hypotheses' in research design, and the conflicts between clinical and research operations to the detriment of both); 5, the unfortunately greater emphasis on mental disease rather than mental health at the price of investigating concepts of improvement, the convalescent process in childhood disturbances, and reality environmental factors which are supportive or destructive for the child; 6, professional practices and attitudes which seriously inhibit the training and development of needed personnel, lay or medical; 7, obsolete institutions and practices including 'the Holy Trinity of the Child Guidance Team', orphanages, and foster homes. By contrast, concerning 'fads', he singles out pharmacotherapy for this caustic statement: 'There is a difference between the thoughtful and judicious use of drugs within the therape