ABSTRACT
The organisation which keeps a human being in adjustment with his fellows and with his environment is very complicated: it is a reflection of the combination of his innate capacities and the physical and social influences that he has encountered in the particular social group in which he happens to have been brought up. The relative strength of the reaction of different individuals to the same situation consequently varies, and it is this individuality which enables some people to remain unscathed by experiences that would induce an acute form of maladjustment in others. Again, among those who become maladjusted some may react in one way and others in quite a different way. Nevertheless, in spite of this diversity, it is possible to describe not more than a few main types of maladjustment which those individuals who become maladjusted in our society exhibit. Many of these are in fact of such common occurrence in their milder forms that they can hardly be regarded as maladjustments at all. They are types of mental mechanism which occur with great frequency in many “normal” people. Only in their more extreme manifestations do they become abnormal.
