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For several years now the psychiatrist has been emerging from the institution where he has been housed for a long time. He is rubbing shoulders with the general medical profession; he is reading papers before general medical meetings. At the last meeting of the A.M.A. here in Washington a whole morning was given over to him by the Section on Internal Medicine. Judging from the conversation of some of my medical friends, what he is doing is still shrouded in mystery.
They recognize perfectly well that he knows what he is talking about when he discusses insanity, but insanity to the average physician is something to get away from, not something to study.
The uncertainties of the insane frighten us, and all we know or care about is, when encountered to get them off our hands into an institution.
The psychiatrist has been studying, in recent years, these institutional cases, with the result that he has taken off his door the sign, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” He even has gone so far as to discard the word asylum or institution and substitute the word hospital.
His studies have carried him into the realms of pathology, chemistry, physiology, and psychology in his effort to understand what is wrong with his patients, and it is to the latter study to which I will devote myself in this discussion.
For my purposes I will define psychology as the study of behavior. By this definition it becomes evident that any successful individual, whose success depends upon human relations, is a psychologist to a greater or less degree. He has to understand and use the behavior