ABSTRACT

The relationship between psychiatry and political science reminds us of those long engagements that somehow never eventuate in marriage. The contributions of psychoanalysis and unfortunately, psychiatry to our understanding of politics are limited by the inordinate "softness" of much psychiatric research. While in psychiatry, too, there is growing dissatisfaction with traditional methods, what has been said about methodological lag in political science applies with even greater force to psychiatry. We know very little altogether about those who consistently refuse to participate in survey studies whatever their nature. It remains broadly true, however, that psychiatry, much less psychoanalysis, has not given to the civil rights area the attention it has given to other problems in the social psychiatry field, or the attention that civil rights problems deserve. It requires little imagination to foresee the time when there are psychiatry members of political science departments, and when political scientists are attached to hospital and clinic staffs.