ABSTRACT
Clinical psychology is at present the largest sub-discipline of psychology and perhaps one of the most prominent fields of applied psychology. Witmer's clinical psychology dealt not only with maladjusted children but also included in its scope normal subjects, the aims being the same, namely to foster the individual's development and well-being. It is customary to say that clinical psychology, as a peculiar ambit of psychology was born in 1896, when Lightner Witmer, a pupil of Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, founded the first Psychological Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania. It was Witmer's intention that clinical psychology, borrowing a typically medical term, should be an autonomous psychological rather than medical discipline. Witmer's early proposal had a fairly influential scientific legacy clinical psychology underwent huge growth only after World War II, when it became a profession in every respect. In the United States such a fragmentation can be recognized well before the period when clinical psychology developed as a profession.
