Psychiatry to the Rescue

We have had several interesting attempts to generalize the meaning of history from one special angle or another. Climate, geography, religion, politics, economics, biology, sociology, psychology, sex, have all played their predominant and prepotent parts in these theorizings. Huntington, Buckle, Kidd, Cramb, Marx, Darwin, Spencer, Nordau, Freud, have contributed significantly to our completer understanding of those complications of human behavior collectively called history. Nor must we fail to mention the enlightening studies of Bagehot, LeBon, Shotwell, Robinson, Boas, Veblen, Rivers, Dewey, Angell, Russell, Spengler. For all that, I should like to insist that a profound study of history is yet to be made. It seems increasingly clear that the motives of men (which underlie the meanings of history) cannot be keenly fathomed except by a group of philosophical analysts with an extraordinary equipment in psychopathology, social science, literature, the history of culture. No volume has yet appeared representing this desirable combination of knowledges and abilities. The stress will fall, I believe, on psychopathology. My opinion is that the next great event in the history of human thought will be the reinterpretation of behavior from the angle of a flexible psychopathology.

Whatever field of life we touch, straightway we are in the presence of problems of maladjustment. Whether we go over the field of criminology, juvenile delinquency, marriage and divorce, business relations, the institutions of the home, the church, the state, the school, or study the intricate taboos and sacred sanctions of ethical codes, or peer into the mob-intricacies of journalism, or specialize in the phenomena of crowd behavior, persistently and inescapably we are in the perturbing presence of problems that can be approached intelligently only from a psychiatric point of view. History, penetratingly conceived, is a branch of psychoanalytic psychiatry.

What a shameful commentary on the low-thoug