ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two groups of aides who work at Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Research and Training Institute (PPI), those who have been there for the longest time and those who have only recently arrived. It explores conceptions of the aides' functions among the lower echelon. Aides recruited at PPI are not particularly sophisticated in knowledge of psychiatric care and are not, in any sense, professionals. Aside from a probable propensity to underrate the capacities of nonprofessionals, they have a middle-class misapprehension of how working-class people reason and calculate. The nursing supervisors and the nurses share a view of the aides, emphasizing the importance of aides' reporting information about patients and being reasonably sympathetic to patients. The psychotherapeutically oriented men place varying degrees of reliance upon aides' natural sagacity and human sensitivities, but all believe in the good aide's intuitive sensibility to psychological relationships.
