7. Implications for the Concepts of Health and Education

The issues of adaptation, synthesis, rank order, and rational action lead us to the question of the possible criteria for the concept of mental health.1 The solution is simple whenever freedom from symptoms and health can be equated. If we add the factor of enduring freedom from symptoms and resistance to disruptions, we are still in a realm which is easily dealt with empirically, though not prognostically. But beyond the range where these criteria can be applied, it is very hard to give a scientific definition of mental health, or to define the state to which we want to lead our patients by the means of psychoanalysis. All the contexts in which we have here encountered the concept of health give us hints, but none—and not even all of them together—yield a sufficiently broad, flexible, and unequivocal definition of it. Moreover, health is, in part, a very individual matter. Finally, the commonly used criteria of health are obviously colored by Weltanschauung, by “health-morality,” by social and political goals. In the analysis of our patients we have become familiar with the psychological background for the various conceptions