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'Some kinds of critical change in a person's life experience bring about a change in his sense of identity which is not subjectively recognized and acknowledged until one or two years after the critical event or initiation of the critical change.' Mathers first formed this impression as an army psychiatrist when interviewing expatriate soldiers in India in 1943. Soldiers experiencing a 'failure to adapt to the stress of expatriation' had usually left the United Kingdom twelve to fifteen months before being referred to him because of low morale. In the first years after the war, the author was surprised to meet a number of men who had been satisfactorily resettled with the help of the authorities and who, after about eighteen months, had given up good jobs or occupational prospects and sought jobs of their own choosing. 'It seemed that subjectively even when the experience of resettlement went smoothly, this amount of time had to elapse before some men had regained enough self-confidence to reassert their autonomy as individuals.' Mathers presents supportive evidence from studies of bereavement, offenders in psychiatric prisons, and students at universities for his hypothesis of this critical time period of one or two years. He points out that 'if accepted this hypothesis has significant implications for those programs in education and therapy from which personality change commonly results and suggests that the effectiveness of such programs cannot be adequately assessed less than eighteen months from their initiation'.