greatly the general view as to what should be
the chief concern of psychology. One only need take up a book on
psychology to see what a strong desire there always was to contrast a
pure psychology and an applied psychology, and to base a new science
directly on the new acquisitions of the primary sciences such as anatomy
and histology of the nervous system. There was a quest for the elements
of mind and their immediate correlation with the latest discoveries in
the structure of the brain. The centre theory and the cell and neurone
theory seemed obligatory starting-points. To-day we have become shy of
such postulates of one-sided not sufficiently functional materialism. We
now call for an interest in psychobiological facts in terms of critical
common sense and in their own right--largely a product of psychiatry.
There always is a place for elements, but there certainly is also a
place for the large momentous facts of human life just as we find and
live it.

Thus psychiatry has opened to us new conceptions and understandings of
the relation of child and mother, child and father, the child as a
reagent to the relations between mother and father, brothers and
sisters, companions and community--in the competitions of real concrete
life. It has furnished a concrete setting for the interplay of emotions
and their effects.

It has led us from a cold dogma of blind heredity and a wholesale
fatalistic asylum scheme, to an understanding of individual, familiar,
and social adjustments, and a grasp on the factors which we can consider
individually and socially modifiable. We have passed from giving mere
wholesale advice to a conscientious study of the problems of each unit,
and at the same time we have developed a new and sensible approach to
mental hygiene and prevention, as expressed in the comprehensive surveys
of State and community work and even more clearly in the development of
helps to individuals in finding themselves, and in the work in schools
to reach those who need a special adaptation of aims and means. To the
terrible emergency of the war it was possible to bring experienced men
and women as physicians and nurses, and how much was done, only those
can appreciate who have seen the liberality with which all the
hospitals, and Bloomingdale among the first, contributed more than their
quota of help, and all the assistance that could possibly be offered to
returning victims for their readjustment.

It is natural enough