The Development of Social Psychiatry

As we look backward we can see the specialized interest now designated as social psychiatry advancing along three different lines. One, and here we find at first the greatest momentum, appears among the psychiatrists. Another, which was largely stimulated by the first, appears among the sociologists, while the third, mental hygiene, in attempting to stress its practical purpose, was forced from the start to recognize in its synthetic attack the significance of the social environment.

In this discussion our concern is with the second approach chiefly and the third must be ignored lest we be carried far afield into the various forms of social maladjustment.

Albion Small in his “Evolution of Sociological Consciousness of the United States” has listed as the 98th reference an article entitled “Sociology and Psychoanalytical Psychology.”1 This he regarded as the first appearance of definite interest among the sociologists in what now has developed into social psychiatry. It is evidence of the rapid growth of this interest that Professor Small, then editor of the American Journal of Sociology, suggested the changing of the article as originally written so as to give it wider appeal because it was his opinion that there were at that time not more than half a dozen American sociologists even familiar with the vocabulary of psychoanalysis. The article as first written appeared during 1916 in the Psychoanalytic Review.2 In the second article, which Small lists in his account of the development of American sociological thinking, appears the following: