Psychoanalysis and Vocational Guidance: A Lecture

There are many reasons why we need, at this time, all the light that can possibly be thrown, from any source, on this subject of vocational guidance. Diversional occupation, vocational education, industrial rehabilitation have become almost household terms, at least with a considerable proportion of the population, and the application in practice of the principles that are implicit in the procedures so designated, is supposed to have a distinct therapeutic value. Then again our society is organized along industrial lines and many of its most serious illnesses are supposedly due to industrial factors, so it becomes of the first importance to discover, if possible, the nature of the forces that are operative and of the mechanisms that underly the more obvious surface manifestations of their activities.

Those of us who have had for many years to deal with the more malignant types of psychoses and have at once felt our helplessness in the matter of therapy and seen the slowly growing spirit of scepticism in the face of repeated therapeutic promises and failures ripen into a hopelessness that expressed itself in an attitude of do-nothingness have had finally presented to us the principles uncovered by psychoanalysis. Those of us who have not been permanently repelled by the crudeness with which these principles were at first expressed, and who have not been misled into wrong ideas by over-enthusiastic but half-baked propagandists, those of us, in other words, who have been able to see past and beyond the bungling efforts of the new-born idea in its first attempts to make itself