ABSTRACT
The results of the first investigation to be reported underlie most of our subsequent work. Thirty-nine items were selected from the item-sheet on the basis of their general psychological interest; these items covered the social history of the patient, his personality, and his symptoms fairly adequately. The actual items selected are given in Table 1. Our experimental population originally consisted of 1,000 male service patients; in order to reduce the complexity of the factors operating, however, the following groups of cases were excluded: cases of epilepsy, cases where head injury formed part of the present illness, cases with previous organic illness of the Central Nervous System, or with present sign of such illness, cases with organic mental syndromes, and cases where physical illness was an important factor. Thus our experimental group was finally reduced to 700 patients suffering from the mainly reactive types of mental illness. No attempt was made to equate the numbers of patients diagnosed as hysterics, anxiety states, depressions, psychopaths, etc.; apart from the patients excluded on the above-mentioned grounds, our group represents successive admissions completely unselected.
