he
Utica State Hospital, hiding behind the dogma that "mind cannot become
diseased, but only the body." To-day "mental and moral causes" are
recognized again in truer form--no longer as mere ideas and
uninvestigated suppositions taken from uncritical histories, but as
concrete and critically studied life situations and life factors and
life problems. Our patients are not sick merely in an abstract mind, but
by actually living in ways which put their mind and the entire organism
and its activity in jeopardy, and we are now free to see how this
happens--since we study the biography and life history, the resources of
adaptation and of shaping the life to success or to failure.

The study of life problems always concerns itself with the interaction
of an individual organism with life situations. The first result of a
recognition of this fact was a more whole-hearted and practical concept
of personality.

In 1903 I put together for the first time my analysis of the neurotic
personality, which was soon followed by a series of studies on the
influences of the mental factors, and in 1908 a paper on "What Do
Histories of Cases of Insanity Teach Us Concerning Preventive Mental
Hygiene During the Years of School Life?" All this was using for
psychiatry the growing appreciation of a broad biological view-point in
its concrete application. It was a reaction against the peculiar fear of
studying the facts of life simply and directly as we find and experience
them--scoffed at because it looked as if one was not dealing with
dependable and effective data. Many of the factors mentioned as causes
do not have the claimed effects with sufficient regularity. It is quite
true that not everybody is liable to any serious upset by several of the
handicaps sometimes found to be disastrous during the years of
development; but we have learned to see more clearly why the one person
does and the other does not suffer. Evidently, not everybody who is
reserved and retiring need be in danger of mental disorder, yet there
are persons of just this type of make-up that are less able than others
to stand the strains of isolation, of inferiority feeling, of exalted
ambitions and one-sided longings, intolerable desires, etc. The same
individual difference of susceptibility holds even for alcohol. With
this recognition we came to lay stress again on the specific factors
which make for the deterioration of habits, for tantrums with
imaginations, and for drif