ABSTRACT

It is the urgent psychic problems of patients, much more than the questions put by scientific workers, which have given effective impetus to the newer developments in medical psychology and psychotherapy. The science of medicine has avoided all contact with strictly psychic problems. It has held to this position in spite of the patient’s urgent needs, but on the partly justified assumption that psychic problems belong to other fields of study. And yet it has been forced to widen its scope so as to include experimental psychology, just as it has been driven time and time again—in view of man’s biological homogeneity—to borrow from such branches of science as chemistry, physics and biology.