Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic. XXXVII, 1973: Some Recollections of the Birth, Infancy and Childhood of the American Orthopsychiatric Association (1963). Pp. 355-366.

In a way psychiatry in its modern sense, and also orthopsychiatry, was born in World War I. The genealogy of the Association was atypical, for it had three grandfathers: Ernest Southard, William Healy, and Dr. Menninger's own father. Southard was the first to use psychologists and social workers clinically in a diagnostic team. Healy in 1915 pointed to the need for scientific medical care of delinquent children. Dr. Menninger's father constantly encouraged him to maintain professional contacts throughout the country, thus contributing to a large organization of psychiatrists. The father of the Association was Herman Adler, who had a special genius for visualizing projects on a grand scale and was highly persuasive. He coined the name 'orthopsychiatric', a way of straightening people and getting them away from the idea that as the twig is bent, so the tree is permanently inclined. He hoped that even criminals could be treated.

The first meeting of the Association was at the home of David Levy in Chicago. He gave what he said was the first psychoanalytic paper ever read at a meeting of the Orthopsychiatric Association, a case of pseudocyesis in a ten-year-old girl. It became the stated intention of the Association to consider psychologic and social work colleagues as equal members. Among the motives for forming the Association were a wish to overcome the loneliness of psychiatry by getting together with allied disciplines and a reaction to the general spirit of therapeutic nihilism with its overemphasis on diagnosis in the 1920's.