ABSTRACT
During over 100 years of devoted research and practice, psychiatry and psychology have achieved many technological advances: the development of elaborate and complex systems of psychiatric nosology, sophisticated assessment devices, many kinds of psychotherapy; and a wide armamentarium of psychotheapeute drugs. Some psychiatrists and psychologists and an array of social scientists have argued that what we are dealing with here are essentially "problems in living", not "diseases". A state of well-being may, under certain circumstances, be one of the criteria of mental health, but it is insufficent to serve as the chief criterion. The mental disorders appear to have very powerful consequences for the general social adjustment of the affected individual. In American psychology, type theory has generally tended to be regarded as a discreditable enterprise, and there has been a good deal of research devoted to demonstrating that popular classifications of personality are without foundation.
